Why You, Dear Readers, Should Get Gravatars

All of us here know the value of comments. Don’t know the value of comments? Well, if I didn’t know how to beat a dead horse well, I wouldn’t be a blogger. Well written comments have the power to do the following:

• Network you and your blog with other established bloggers. They may even comment you back.
• Network your blog with other blogs’ readers.
• Create slight SEO benefits to your blog.

Of course, one lesser known and lesser utilized advantages of commenting on blogs is spreading your brand. Sure, this happens to an extent with every comment, provided you use the same commentator name and link back to the same blog. But if this is all you do, you are missing out on something big!

Gravatar: The Marketing Hero

Gravatars help you spread your brand even further when you comment through one simple implementation: It uploads a photo that stands beside each of your comments. So now, not only will people start seeing and recognizing your name on the blogs that you frequently comment, they will also start seeing and recognizing your picture or blog logo.

For those of you unfamiliar with Gravatar, it’s a globally recognized avatar, and it automatically associates an image and link of your choosing (both representing your Gravatar) with your email address. Best of all, it’s hard to find a blog that doesn’t integrate Gravatar’s seamlessly into their comments.

Not only do Gravatars help spread your brand with an image, they also save you time. You no longer have to keep filling in links to your blog whenever you comment; all you have to do is type in the email associated with your Gravatar and Gravatar will take care of the rest, providing the rest of the blogosphere with your pretty picture and link back to your blog.

Three Effective Tips For Making Your Gravatar Snazzy

Now that you know the importance of having a Gravatar, let’s look into ways to help your Gravatar stand out:

1) Use Contrast Effectively. Think about the blogs you comment on most. Do they have white backgrounds? Perhaps you should use a colorful or dark background for your Gravatar image. Of course, you also want to make sure the background of your image has enough contrast to differentiate from the object of your image.

2) Use a high quality image and interesting composition. Believe it or not, despite how tiny a Gravatar image appears on blogs, I’ve still seen some that are pixilated. This is the complete mark of an unprofessional. Upload your image at maximum resolution (512 pixels wide), and also try to use a clean and clear (but interesting) composition. If there are too many little things going on in the image, it will look like a pile of digital puke.

3) Face or Logo? Honestly, I think you can go either way with this one. Since there are so many Gravatars with faces and since so many portraits of faces look virtually the same, I’m more inclined to say that a unique logo would be more memorable. Still, you can be creative and really do a lot with editing and color manipulation on your portrait. Also, having a face behind your comment (and your blog) is a powerful gesture that wins the hearts and loyalty of many readers.

This is a guest post by Carol Wilson, you can check out the guidelines to guest post here.

Image Credit: Will Lion