Photo credit sxc.hu

Among a few other things, one of my biggest worries related to the time and effort I’m putting into this blog lately is comments from readers.

Specifically, the lack of them.

I equated it with having little influence. Not good for a blog that talks about creating influence, right?

Today, I read a nice post by Chip Griffin of Media Bullseye about “Throwing Out The Social Media Rulebook”.

One of the rules (myths?) of social media Chip debunks is this:

#9 - Lack of Comments Means Lack of Influence.

He quotes a statistic of 1% to 10% of any blog’s audience being people who comment or leave other feedback, and cites the example of one powerful, influential blogger whose homepage posts have very few comments.

My experience is about the same. In all, Money.Power.Wisdom has had 138 posts and 364 comments today… from over 11,000 unique visits!

True, blog comments are not the only measure of ‘influence’ - but another interesting paradigm that Chip’s post opened up was about having an ‘audience’.

Comments and feedback are very important metrics if you measure ‘influence’ by the ability to initiate a conversation. But another effective parameter to track is the total number of readers who visit your blog and keep coming back.

If you have 25 comments on a blog post that is read by 40 readers, do you have more influence? Or does a blog read by 1,500 people (with 1% ‘comment rate’) rank higher on the influence scale?

What do you think?