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A large part of the beauty of blogging is being able to interact with your readers through the use of comments. This is often how pages go viral, and a lot of traffic can be generated through the judicious use of a sound blog comments policy. Let’s look at what’s involved, as well as why you might want to do this, and why you might not want to!
We’ve all seen all the various types of comments that attach themselves to bog posts. Many are useful, some are spammy, and some are downright profane. Depending on the nature of your blog, you want to institute a policy of carefully watching your comments, and making sure they not only don’t offend your other readers, but also don’t go overly negative on you. A simple disagreement is okay, and can be a spark for a combustive and popular post.
These are some of the benefits of blog comments. They can help you popularize your blog, answer questions, create community, and help establish relationship with your readers that otherwise might be very difficult to do.
The downside is that you might get unfairly flamed, and have to put out a fire. The easy way to take care of that is to set your program to where you (or your blog administrator) have to approve comments before they can go live on the blog. This of course is time-consuming, and can seriously detract from the spontaneity of the conversation. Your choices here involve how much time and resources you can devote to this, and how closely you want to control the tone of your blog.
If you have a member of your staff or team that can handle this, it’s a very good idea to outsource this part of your business. As long as they are in step with how you think and feel, this is a no-brainer.
You obviously want to delete or prevent from posting all spam comments. This would include self-serving comments like “nice post”, complete with Viagra affiliate link. It’s important to do this for several reasons, one being that if your visitors see lots of spammy comments, they will infer that you don’t care much about it, or aren’t around much.
You also have the ability to ban serial spammers and negative posters, and you should do so. This can be easily accomplished through your blog’s administrative functions.
Also now working hand in hand with your comments is the ability to spread the word about your post and conversation through social media. Having the appropriate buttons, as well as perhaps a ReTweet function can do wonders for the viral aspect of your blog posts.
Also, getting into trackbacks and pingbacks can have a good search engine result for your blog.
Most of the time blog comments are a good thing. Just make sure you have a plan in place that will enable you to monitor the conversation for the common (and your) good!
