Take A Chance

Those who know me best in the blogosphere know that I have no love for self proclaimed experts and gurus who sell snake oil disguised as the single source solution for becoming a successful blogger.

It irks me to hear them promote something that is clearly not true. There is no one way to do this, no single path that you have to follow. The truth is there are multiple ways to do this “correctly” and much of that is tied into whatever your goals are for blogging.

Those goal(s) aren’t’ always tied into monetizing the blog either. Sometimes your blog won’t be the source of money for your business but it might be the engine that drives it. But we aren’t focused on monetizing the blog now because this post is about taking a chance.

This post is a reminder that successful bloggers find success because they are willing to take a chance and try different ways of doing things. It is part of what I love about blogging. I love how fluid the environment is and how easy it is to shift gears and that is what I did today.

I made a change.

I changed commenting systems and installed DISQUS. I haven’t used it on a blog in several years and it has undergone major changes since I last did so I wanted to get the inside scoop.

It looks good and I like what I see. I like how you can build communities around it and follow commenters. I like the social sync aspect too.

From the outside looking in it appears to me to be similar to Livefyre. That is of interest to me because I have seen Livefyre serve as a very useful tool for engaging commenters and encouraging discussion.

So now we’ll take a look at DISQUS and see how it compares. If it is as effective as advertised I will let it run and focus on other areas. If it doesn’t perform and I can’t attribute the lack of performance to something else we’ll make another change.

All it takes is a moment to point and click our way to the next plugin. Certainly the goal is to find one that works and to stick with it, but if it doesn’t we can always take a chance.