In our last post about 7 blogging tips for the beginner, one of the tips was to take note of your comments and respond to them.  Receiving comments on a blog is incredibly exciting, especially when you are first starting out. Do you think blog commenting is important?  Let’s explore it here.

Receiving comments ultimately means that people are finding your site and reading your content.  That is great…because without readers, your blog will be sitting in cyber space and not really doing much!  No-one wants that for their blog regardless of whether you are doing it for business or as a hobby.

It is however important to take a good look at the type of blog commenting you are receiving, before you start getting too excited.  Are they real comments or just spammy ones?  You will find that some people are only participating in blog commenting in order to leave a link on your blog.  This is ok, provided that the link is not inappropriate.  If you receive these kind of comments it is recommended you delete them and mark them as spam.

One way of managing your blog commenting is to change the settings in your dashboard to ensure that your comments require approval before they are posted.  This ensures that only comments of value are being added to your site.  There is no problem with approving a comment that the author has added a link to, provided that the link is appropriate.

I would also highly recommend you install a free plugin (Askimet) if you operate a WordPress blog.  This plugin will automatically sort through the comments and remove the spam.  It is however still a good idea to browse your spam folder every now and then because sometimes a genuine comment does slip through the net, but Askimet certainly takes out a lot of the hard work when it comes to sorting through spam!

It may seem like a lot of effort to approve each and every one of your comments, but it certainly has it’s advantages and in reality it only takes a few minutes to do.  Why should you respond to every comment?  Well that is pretty simple:

Encourages Interaction: Blog commenting is a two way process.  It is about receiving and responding to comments on the blog. Responding gives you the opportunity to talk to your readers, which in turn encourages a higher level of interaction and invites those readers to return to your blog.  The greater rapport you build with people, the higher the chance they will come back to you. Responding to your readers also gives the message that you value their input and people will start to see your blog as a place of value.

Helps your SEO: Search engines like to see blog commenting.  Comments are a good sign that people are finding your content to be of value and thus more traffic will be sent your way.  By leaving comments there is a also a high chance that your keywords are being used more and hence giving greater opportunity for those words to be found in search engines.

Quality content is added: When you start to see an increase in blog commenting on your site, the quality of your content will also increase.  Readers will not only read your post, but will also start to read the comments that have been left by others, as this is a way of them gaining extra knowledge on the subject.  You may even find that people leave comments that would not have done so otherwise, purely because they have seen the amount of interaction.  Blog commenting is therefore a great way of adding quality content to your site.

Assists with your credibility: Readers will return to your blog if they consider you to be an expert in that niche and someone who can be of value to them.  By responding to readers comments, you are asserting yourself as the expert in your niche and putting yourself out there as someone to ‘go to’.  Responses to comments shows that you are a real person and care about your readers.  This will go a long way to building rapport.

How to encourage blog commenting on your site:

There are many ways to encourage readers to interact with you and these basics will provide you with a good grounding.

Write Interesting Blog Posts: This goes without saying, that unless you are writing a post of value, you are unlikely to receive comments.  Your post needs to be providing the reader with value, otherwise it is like walking into a shop and leaving empty handed.  You need to be providing a service to your readers, and that service is the content of your posts.

Ask Questions: Asking questions will ultimately kick start your readers into thinking of an answer, and will prompt them to respond and increase blog commenting on your site.  It is generally a good idea to leave a question at the end of your post, which leaves readers with the option to leave their thoughts or opinions.

Connect with other bloggers: Blog commenting on other site’s in your niche is incredibly important.  This will help build connection and quite often those authors will return the favor on your blog.  When I say leave valuable comments, they must be precisely that.   The comment needs to be connected to the blog post and also provide value to the author.  Leaving a comment such as “great work” or “nice post” is rarely going to make it past the moderation process.  These types of comments would be classified as spam, and who would want that on their blog.  Think about the types of comments YOU would like to receive and those are the types of comments that you need to be leaving elsewhere.

Share your posts on social media: This was also covered in our 7 blogging tips.  By putting your posts ‘out there’, you are asking for interaction, and interaction is likely to lead to more blog commenting.

What are your thoughts?

What type of blog commenting are you receiving and providing?  Are they quality comments that are building interactions with your readers?  How does it make you feel when you receive comments on your blog?

Please leave me a comment below and let me know what you think.