Since we parted at the end of lesson two, I’ve been busy working on traffic building with a combination of comment marketing and blog carnival submissions.

Submissions to blog carnivals are actually pretty easy. If you already have good content on your blog that you want to promote, then it is simply a matter of submitting those posts to the relevant carnivals and waiting for the link back to your blog. Unfortunately, based on my experience so far, blog carnival submissions alone won’t do much. My biggest spike of traffic came when I physically went to each of the blogs that had also submitted their blog posts to the same carnival, read through them and posted comments.

At this juncture, I think I should point out that leaving 10 comments on different blogs or forums is actually a lot more time consuming than it sounds. If the idea of commenting on other blogs is to draw traffic back to your own blog, then one needs to construct a thoughtful reply that would interest others to click the link back to your blog to find out a little more about who you are. Therefore, a simple, “great post!” or “I agree with you!” just won’t cut it, especially if you are commenting on a popular blog that receives lots of comments.

One great thing about writing into blog carnivals is that it helps you find other blogs and more specifically, other blog posts that are relevant to the topics that you write about. So rather than searching aimlessly and commenting blindly on random blogs that may or may not be related to the topics you are interested in, blog carnivals help give you a focus. You don’t waste time looking for relevant blogs or blog posts. Clearly, the more specific the carnival, the better. For instance, a blog carnival about baby humour is clearly more specific than a blog carnival about Family Living which could be about anything and everything under the sun.

I should also add, as I discovered so recently, that leaving “thoughtful” (or perhaps I should write “thought-provoking”) comments can be a double-edged sword. The blogosphere is filled with readers with very strong opinions who may and will easily take offense to what you’ve written, regardless of whether it is intended or purely misconstrued. Then, there are the readers who will pick fault regardless of how amicably your try to put forth your point of view.

It is inevitable, as you grow your readership, that you will encounter plenty of such individuals. Finding a way to handle them appropriately will be a bit of a challenge – one that some of us might shy away from. Being a rather non-confrontational person, I dislike such frays, even though I do enjoy discussions amounting from a difference of opinion. What’s the difference, you may ask. The difference being that the former may amount to name calling and other methods of verbal abuse, whereas the latter is constructive and educational.

This also leads me to a very interesting concept that I remember reading about in a sports book called The Mind Gym. Under a chapter entitled “Permission to Win”, the author aptly describes an inherent problem faced by many of us who seek the spot light but have not yet had the opportunity to really bask in it for all its glory. I will use the example described by the author to illustrate the point.

In a golf tournament, there was a player who was not among the top rated players who had emerged out of the blue as a contender for the trophy. Being a wild card, no one had ever expected him to win. Quite frankly, I’m sure, neither did he. One hole away from the trophy, all that was required of him was a conservative shot – it was an easy win. Instead, he hit a bogey and lost the tournament.

What happened? He hadn’t given himself permission to win. He was so used to being the underdog that he wasn’t prepared for success. While this might be a sports example, I think the philosophy is relevant in all other aspects of our lives. In this particular case, it is going from being a regular blogger to a professional blogger. While we might aspire to become a professional blogger, the mindset of being a professional blogger might not be there. In other words, we might be unintentionally sabotaging our efforts to become a professional blogger through unwitting actions that detract from our blogs because we are secretly unsure of how to deal with blogger fame.

A simplistic blogging example might be what I described earlier. I mentioned my dislike of verbal debates amounting to little more than petty name calling. Although I felt I had posted a carefully drafted comment, another reader had obviously seen fit to make a mockery of my response after misconstruing the true meaning of my comment. The realisation that to become prominent in the blogging world also means to become a target for such individuals might have led me to retreat to the insular world of my own blog, never to venture out again.

It is our fear of the consequences of success that hold us back from performing at our best. Until we can overcome that fear and accept the responsibility of success, we will not have the proper mindset to succeed.