My Friend James Brausch Recently Turned Off Comments on His Blog…
Due to an overwhelming amount of comment spam, my friend James Brausch recently turned off the ability to post comments on his blog.
However, he just tipped his hat to a brilliant and positive “side effect” that not allowing comments will produce for him.
Increased link popularity!
You see… The only way to leave a comment on his blog now is to add a trackback post on your own blog (as I’m doing right now.)
So now, when he posts one of his though provoking challenges (such as his current “guess what this graph is“) post, he will have dozens of other bloggers giving him links, via trackbacks while informing their readers about his blog at the same time.
I know that this was not the main reason he turned off comments. I really believe that he did it due to the amount of spam he was getting.
But in truly brilliant and unique “Brausch Style” he turned lemons into lemonade.
Eric
PS - By the way James… My guess is that the graph is your alexa rankings. (And I expect to see a nice little “spike” after this experiment!)
Popularity: 4% [?]
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February 5th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
While it is true that this will increase link popularity, I believe you and James will both see, in time, that the particular way James runs his blog will largely not work well without Comments enabled. It is a good theory to use trackback instead, but the practicality just isn’t there for his type of system. We’ll just wait and see. I expect him to reverse his decision within 90 days.
February 6th, 2007 at 3:08 am
Hmm.
Since he turned his comments off he has had just 2 comments. Early days but I doubt that there are dozens of back links on offer.
Unlike Yatzi, who is spot on with his analysis of Brausch’s blog, I think comments will be back within a month.
Brausch s however doing most of us never do and is TESTING.
February 7th, 2007 at 10:13 am
I agree with the others: This is not a sound way to keep your blogging community active.
Akismet works quite well on WordPress blogs (like he has) to stop spam. And if that doesn’t stop it 100%, there’s always Captcha.
Using little tricks to get people to link to him isn’t very honest. And the people who know how to pingback SHOULD certainly see through the veil.
Nothing beats the straightforward approach.
February 8th, 2007 at 11:36 am
David,
Sorry about the misunderstanding. I did not mean to imply that James turned off comments simply as a sneaky way to get trackbacks.
I agree 100% that nothing beats a straight forward and honest approach to business.
I was just making an observation that additional trackbacks may be a interesting side effect of James’s decision.
In 99% of cases, I agree that bloggers should leave the commenting ability on their blogs enabled to ensure a sense of community.
However, I know the premium that James places on his time. From my understanding he shoots for working about 3 hours a day and spends the rest with his family. So perhaps in his case, saving even a few minutes a day in blog administration is worth giving it a test.
And perhaps after this test, James will “change it back”.
But like Derek said, the bottom line is that James is at least testing it to see what effect it will have.
Happy testing!
Eric
February 10th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Comments on or off - his writing style is entertaining and informative.
Having been around a few forums alot of people just tend to be rude and negative with their comments and quite frankly I don’t blame him for turning off the comments.
February 10th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
I don’t think James will ever turn comments back on. And I don’t think his blog will suffer in the least.
I don’t know James, but find him, his site, and his products interesting. I own two of his products, am awaiting a third, and am overall pleased.
Although I don’t know James, I believe he is sincere in stating comment SPAM isn’t the driving reason he turned-off comments - there are many effective ways to eliminate SPAM. I believe it’s what James considers nonsensical BS comments that led him to abandon them - for which there is no easy solution to eliminate.
A problem with comments in general is anonymity. Anonymous commenter’s tend to be rude, half thought, and often are sensationalists. There are exceptions, but that’s generally true. Read enough blogs and visit enough forums and it’s hard to disagree.
Anonymous people are more likely to be rude and insulting. Also, it’s impossible to put an anonymous comment in perspective.
Trackbacks eliminate anonymity and have proved to be a good strategy to build traffic. Seth Godin comes to mind. A side benefit to trackbacs is when you tracked back to James in this post, you shared that with your entire audience…leading more people to his site. That’s not a trick.
You can make people register to leave comments, but anyone can register anything. Hiding behind your website is hard.
February 10th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Brausch is spot on. I do not have a blog. I have however used his most excellent Glyphius product to increase turnover at my e-commerce site www.exoticandoriental.co.uk by a solid 2% over 30 days. Put this in perspective it has paid for itself five times over!
How do I know this? Rewriting the selling copy in Glyphius was the only thing I changed in this month and crazy egg was used to measure where customers went.
What I obviously failed to make clear is the assumption that simply by turning off his comments he would get dozens of backlinks from other blogs was wrong.
It just isn’t happening and the reason it isn’t happening is that a lot of jamesbrausch.com blog readers are ardent procrastinators!
Brausch is indeed crystal clear why he turned the comments off and he is to be congratulated for practising what he preaches and testing.
My earlier post comment was not meant to be a “low value comment” so obviously I have some work to do as regards clarity when commenting.
February 10th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
When James Brausch (or Eric Graham) speaks, I not only listen. I take notes.
James is a brilliant entrepreneur, particularly for a guy with no marketing background. His actions are sometimes controversial — but they always make a point, and they are very protective of something James values deeply.
His time.
I learn from James and Eric. Always. And one of the biggest things I’ve learned is to develop a spine (something I see this industry lacking), and a mind.
One of the biggest drawbacks of the social atmosphere of Web 2.0 is this “sense of community.” Community is good. Feeding the herd mentality is bad.
A great example is Danny Sullivan, SEO expert, who tried to reason with Diggers after being lambasted by Jason Calacanis:
http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2007/02/09/daring-danny-duels-with-diggers
That said, I prefer blogs over forums, since you can somewhat control how conversations go — in forums, you can’t. With blogs, you can put forward topics that people respond to, and bring the conversation back on track. And even in these cases, it can be more work than trying to fight off spammers.
I think watching on the sidelines and seeing what kind of results James achieves with his new approach is well worth the price of admission.
(I know I’m watching!)
February 10th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Hello Dr. Eric!
I followed you over here from James’ blog post.
My take? I don’t think that James (nor anybody else) is interested in people who simply want to plaster his blog with comments. While turning off comments does make it more difficult to make a comment, and I, for one, don’t want to fill up my blog with posts that link to his blog simply to get a comment there, it’s not going to drop his core readership at all. If anything, the lack of comments will help eliminate the distractions to his message.
While the number of comments will drop and PERHAPS the total number of blog readers will decrease when the “comment critters” stop visiting, the people that James wants to read his blog will still come. After all, for the most part, we don’t visit a blog to make comments!
Although this post is an exception to that rule…
Best regards,
Tom
February 12th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Michel,
You are exactly right…
“Community is good. Feeding the herd mentality is bad.”
The problem with online communities is that the community is only as good as the members who participate in it.
And in most online communities, you have little or no control over who participates. Unless of course you take measures such as James has taken.
By limiting those who can post “comments” to only owners of other blogs, he is effectively narrowing the scope of his commenters to those who have at least taken SOME action online.
While not all blog owners have the same level of quality or expertise of a Michel Fortin. At least most of them are DOERS not just TALKERS (like you see in many forums.)
Eric
February 13th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Hmmm. Now this should be an interesting experiment to watch. James never does anything half-arse, I’ll give him that, lol.
And since I’ve making the move to WP myself (and navigating through the wonderful world of plugins), I’m always intrigued what others are doing with their blogs.
John
February 14th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Geez.
Looks like I touched your friend’s nerve on his blog. I think he thought I was accusing him personally of dishonesty. No, just the tactic of linkbaiting. And if that’s not what he was doing — if he was just tired of dumb comments — oops. I misunderstood and I’m sorry I got it wrong.
I’d tell him myself except — no comments. No contact email.
And I understand that.
The particular blog of mine that he rampaged about has been up all of 2 or 3 weeks or so, so I’m not taking the attack on my traffic — or on my credibility — or on my authority — or on my dog’s intelligence or anything else in James’ post personally, but… all that was completely unnecessary.
I really like what Michel announced though — pingbacks and trackbacks without the “nofollow” relationship. It’s good for everyone.
Admittedly, I do have plenty to learn (who doesn’t).
Thanks for the unexpected spike in traffic to my site.
David
February 15th, 2007 at 1:45 am
[…] You can see here where I drew more than a chuckle but also the ire of James Brausch, someone I’d never heard of a few days ago. It all goes back to a comment I made here I shouldn’t have. Actually two comments, the second an indignant one. Also one I wish I hadn’t made. […]
April 15th, 2007 at 1:07 am
Interesting comments..