SEVEN

It's a blogger's biggest nightmare when he spends hours putting his thoughts on webspace with all the works - images, paragraphs, indentations, bullets, et al - and no one takes notice. So there you are, ready with your post, beaming with pride, sending out teasers and feelers through links on various blogging communities, group pages on FB, tweets and sometimes even through email. And after all this, all you end up with is three comments. Scary, no?

After deep thought, I have come up with seven unique ways to boost the comments tally on your blog. Here they are:-

1) Write something that will really piss off a large section of people
It need not be something controversial. It just needs to be something about someone/something that's really popular. For example, writing a list of NaMo jokes will surely diss a lot of his supporters. Needless to say, you are likely to end up with more than you bargained for - you might get a death threat or two - but what the heck, you want comments and you're guaranteed to get them.

A word of caution though. Writing something on someone unpopular will not reap the desired effect. That way, you might attract a lot of readership, but all that'll happen is that the post will get shared and might go viral if it really is that good...but people will be too excited to comment. Try writing a Rahul Gandhi joke and see what happens.

2) Set up traps
You'll know what I mean if you've watched the SAW series of movies. Make it impossible for the unfortunate suckers who visited to leave without commenting. You could threaten them a virus attack or unsolicited malware, or repeated playing of some Himesh song in the background till they left a comment.

3) Start a rewards scheme
Make an announcement of a readership loyalty reward scheme. Give points to visitors based on number of comments made. Know that  this one's gonna need hard work, MS-Excel, and loads of vela time. But as the adage goes, 'No pain, no gain'.

4) The mutual admiration club
Fail-proof  method to fetch you loyal readers. Stalk a few bloggers and comment on each and every blog post that comes from them. Let the comments be nice and utterly-butterly. And voila, in a few weeks your blog will have unsolicited readership and will fetch the best of comments. A more systematic and concerted effort will make your blog the toast of blogosphere.

5) Emotional blackmail
An illustration for the uninitiated - "I visit your blog so many times...but you've never visited even once. Not fair man." Unless someone's a cold-hearted freak, everyone falls for this trick.

6) Spam
If you can't get em to do it the right way, then spam spam spam till you succeed.

7) Self-help / split-personality mode
Finally, if nothing seems to help, drop a bit of self-respect, create fake blog profiles and comment on your own blog posts. This way you can show off your blog's 'popularity' and hope that it catches on.

There you go then. Hope these work for you. I'll try these out too ;)

Staying on the number SEVEN, my blog turned 7 today. It's come a long way I guess. It can't possibly live longer than I will, but I hope it lives to be 50 at least.

So here's wishing SCRIPTED IN SANITY a very happy 7th birthday.

Cheers