I love my readers, truly I do

Arianne over at To think is to create wrote a great post about readers and commenting.

I could have almost totally written that post myself. So go read it. Go ahead, I’ll wait right here for you.

Did you read it? All of it? Good.

Like she said

comments matter. . . . This blog is not written for money, and while I do enjoy the opportunities this blog brings my way–at the end of the day it’s still just me and my thoughts and I don’t like talking to my dog. Because that’s what it feels like when a bunch of you read and only a handful leave your thoughts…like speaking out into a foggy night when everyone’s already in their houses and I’m standing alone on the street. When I talk to my dog, she stares at me then walks off completely unaffected.

And as I said in her comments

I so could have written this entry myself. But at my house it wouldn’t be the dawg -she loves me – it would be the cat licking his, well, you know, but none the less not caring about my thoughts or words at all. He might even send a little tail jigging marky-marky my way just to share his thoughts about my words. . . . I want my readers to know that I read them and appreciate that they “leave their mark”, good or bad.

I do try to respond to every commenter, usually in one comment like this one. Some times if it’s been a few days or the post is an older one I respond to the commenter via e-mail instead.

I have a few things up my sleeve for showing my love a bit to my lovely readers who “Leave their mark”. First, I want you all to note that I use two different wonderful plugins that share the luv when you comment. I use Commentluv by FiddyP that parses your last post title and a link to it if you have a public feed. This is great way to get more readers to your blogs, not just mine. Then I also use a plugin called Lucia’sLinkLuv by Lucia of Big Bucks Blogger which allows me not only to better control the commenters and spam, but follows the DoFollow movement for comment. Here, she says it better:

This is a variety of “dofollow” plugin. It’s main function is to strip “nofollow” tags from links in comments. The purpose is to encourage comments by rewarding commenters with “dofollow” links which boosts their rank in search engine. However, this particular plugin also has features that thwart human’s who are paid to visit blogs and leave insipid comments simply to boost their companies back links.

Secondly, I am planning a contest/drawing for the very near future, I just have to get the final details worked out and decide how I am going to do it. It will, no matter what, require a little luv on your part to. So stay tuned and don’t forget to start “leaving your mark” more often.

OH, by the way, go get a gravatar. I am so tired of looking at just mine in the comment section. ;)