I’m an Iron Commenter!

When ICLW August started on the 21st Thursday, I was not sure of targetting to be an Iron Commenter because there was so much happening at the same time- out of town in the weekend, meet-up and church meeting, catching up on trainings, group commitments, etc.

When the 25th Monday came, I find myself catching up on all the commenting. Inspiration striked and I realized I wanted to know:
- if I had what it takes to be an Iron Commenter, and
- what it will take to be an Iron Commenter

So, I settled in my mind to make it a goal to be an Iron Commenter this month. Later when I mentioned it some of my friends, they actually discouraged me as I will be spreading myself thin instead of going deeper with fewer blogs. I totally understand what they were saying, but I had already made a decision.

Here are what I discovered::

- Some blogs made me cry, some made me laugh, some made me pray, some educated me, some confused me and some were easy. What a great bunch of people!

- Themes and colors do matter. Aside from attracting us, the reader-commenters, it is important so as not to cause us headahes. Frankly, there were a couple that were difficult to read and that may have caused my headache…aside from being in front of the PC for more than 8 hrs and the pressure of aiming for Iron Commenter!

- I spent less than 5 minutes with blogs (and their authors) which I have commented on before because I have read their background and previous posts before. That helped.

It takes me about 15-20 minutes to know the person behind the blog so I can comment in a meaningful way. All in all, I probably spent 24 hrs commenting! About 3 hours of commenting per day. About half-week worth of a fulltime worker! Wow, it is tough, very time-consuming. But very well worth it, plenty of good reads!!! (Now, if I can just find them again…because I was in a hurry to finish all the commenting before the deadline, I didn’t bookmark them.)

Anyhow, I think I could still be more efficient and faster than that. If I could go down to 10 minutes/blog, that would be 6 blogs per hour to comment or 20 hrs to be an Iron Commenter for a typical month of 120 bloggers participating. Still a lot of time!

(Alicia - 2 time Iron Commenter, how do you do it???)

Oh BTW, did I tell you that I was doing commenting on The Secret is in the Sauce and Blog Around the World, too? Aaaarrggh! I was thinking “what did I get myself into?” On Thursday, I was only at the 50 mark, so I spent the whole of Thurday on the rest (~75) of the blogs and finished JIT!!!

So for this month, I am proclaiming: (even if Mel has not put up names for the August ICLW round)

Now that I have attained that goal and know what it takes, I think that will be the last time of aiming for Iron Commenter. I can say “been there, done that“! Next time, I’ll go back to my “deeper with fewer” approach to commenting!

One last thing… TIP!

If you are like me and want to track the posts that you made a comment on to see if there are responses to your post, try cocomment.com. Technically, you can use your Google reader to subscribe to comments on a particular post but that is at least 2 clicks. With cocomment.com, the tracking is automatically embedded in your commenting - no additional clicks.

Also, having a separate list of all your comments outside Google Reader helps keep the Google Reader less busy and less intimidating! Having them in a sidebar is helpful too to quickly see which blogs you have commented on already.

Go try it for yourself and see if it helps you manage your comments. Let me know!

Meanwhile, have a great, long weekend ahead. And see you around! In fact, do come back and visit me again even outside of ICLW!