If you have a blog then I hope you’re already doing what you can to encourage a blog comment culture from your readers. I can still remember the moment that I found someone genuine had posted a comment on my blog. It felt fantastic, as though I had now arrived, and was a proper blogger.
One of the key duties of a blogger is to reply to all your blog comments as soon as possible. This inspires readers loyalty and even more comments.
Recently I’ve found myself falling behind with replying to comments. There’s even a name for this – blog comment reply overload. If you have forever increasing responsibilities as a blogger, keeping up with replying to the comments on your blog can become a really difficult challenge, just as I’m experiencing at the moment. Currently I post daily on 2 blogs, twice a week on a third, and am building a new blog as we speak. That’s putting some pressure on me, and is making me have to determine my priorities, so as to ensure time management doesn’t become a problem.
But comments on my blog are really important to me. They show that there are people out there in the Blogosphere interested in my content, who want to interact with me. We all once we have published our posts, hope that we are going to receive a good number of comments. To us this shows that people appreciated it, liked it, though enough of it to comment. I know I will pop on a few hours later just to see if I’ve received any. And still, if there aren’t any there I feel disappointment. I’m still just a child really.
So the last thing I want to do is discourage readers away from my blog, or make them think it’s pointless commenting by not replying to their comments. Comments are far to important for me to give that impression.
My blog comments motivate and inspire me. They make blogging worthwhile. It is so important to show your readers how much you appreciate their comments by reading them and replying. Your comment replies show your readers that you’ve read their contribution on your blog.
I see comments as an integral part of my blog. If I’d never got any blog comments I’d have soon given up blogging. Comments make a blog come alive, creating a type of community made up of your readers. And lets face facts, we all go off first impressions, and if you come across a blog and see every post has zero comments you jump to unfavourable conclusions about the quality and popularity of that blog.
When I only had one blog it was of course far easier. I always ensured I replied to my readers comments, on a daily basis. I regarded this as a very important part of blogging, in interacting with my readers and showing them my thanks and the courtesy of replying. After all they took the time to visit my blog, read my article and write a comment. Personally I thoroughly enjoy reading their feedback and answering their questions. Hey, sometimes they even give me praise.
In the early days, some of my blog commentators helped me to improve my blogging talents. One in particular comes to mind. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but she contributed in such a big way and ensured through her use of commenting, that I became an authentic blogger. She has recently created a wonderful new blog, and I would recommend every one of you to go and have a look. Her blog is called Sparkle Me Zen.
I still rejoice every time I get a comment. The more I get the better I know I’m doing. It tells me I’m doing something right.
So let me in my biased way compare the pros and cons of blog commenting
Pros of enabling blog commenting
- Builds relationships with readers
- Quality comments adds quality content from readers to posts which can make posts that much more informative
- Can build up traffic and increase exposure
- Comments can be good for SEO
- Shows your blogs popularity.
- Helps to Increase traffic.
- Often gives you new blog post ideas
- Supports your fellow bloggers
Cons of enabling blog commenting
- It’s time-consuming to moderate the comments and reply to them
- Dealing with spam comments – although I have enabled Akismet, I still have to look through every spam comment to check if any genuine comments have mistakenly been put there. It happens often. You’ll find some genuine comments fall into the spam folder. My latest report shows Akismet has protected my site from 60,007 spam comments already. That’s in 18 months.
- You may have a problem with negative comments on your blog although in my true opinion all comments, by real people, with real opinions are good.
So surprise, surprise to me the pros by far outweigh the cons. And anyway, I love reading other blogs, and I love to comment on them too. So how could I, if I turned my blogs comments off, or never bothered replying to the ones I do get.
Now all I have to do is manage the process of commenting. Never again will I let blog comments pile up and then feel guilty that I haven’t had time to catch up on them.. I will ensure that I make time to reply to comments on all of my blogs every morning. So I will now create a schedule which includes commenting at 9.30 am. That should make sure I never fall behind again. I will have a slot of 30 minutes specially allocated for blog commenting.
Do you love receiving comments? How do you reply to them? Hey leave me a comment and let me know (I promise I’ll reply).
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