The Value of Business Blog Comments

Keep track of new prospects from your small business blog with a simple CRM and sales tracking tool like Base.

Business blogs can do a lot of good things for your company from business marketing and relationship-building perspectives. They can help you drive relevant traffic through search engines, can provide fodder for your social media marketing and link building efforts, and help you converse with clients and prospects in a way that can help develop and solidify relationships.

But when it comes to business blogging, you might be wondering how valuable blog comments are.

Are they a hassle to manage?
Are you concerned about what people might say in them?

There are pros and cons to enabling comments on blog posts, but if you read on you’ll find out why the pros definitely outweigh the cons:

Cons of Enabling Blog Comments

There are a lot of spammers out there who look to blog comment sections as a way to advertise their wares and to try to siphon link juice out of your website (linking from your site could elevate their own search engine status). Then there are also blog trolls who respond with inflammatory comments in an effort to rile people up.

The solution?
Moderation.

Moderating blog comments on your business blog is important. Not only do you want the quality to stay high but you don’t want your readers to happen upon ads for cheap medication, adult only content, or an invite to win a supposed free iPad. When your site’s online reputation is at stake, you’ll want to monitor and moderate your blog comments for your reputation with readers and search engines.

The big con for many is that managing blog comments can be very labor-intensive. But the benefits can make that labor worthwhile and there are tools that can help lighten the load.

Pros of Allowing Blog Comments

Transparency is something that’s important to many consumers. If you enable comments, you might not only get comments you can classify as rave reviews. But if you allow comments, even ones that aren’t always gushing, you’re showing that you’re open to discussions and that you are interested in what people have to say. If you see an issue you can deal with, you’re working on your reputation management publicly. You always have the choice of posting or not posting a comment but letting the less-than-rave comments through demonstrates a genuine desire to continually improve.

Every comment that’s posted can bring new organic web traffic to your blog. New comments trigger search engine bot visits and can result in higher or more relevant search engine ranking.

Commentary is perceived as popularity so encouraging comments is a good thing. Blog posts can continually inform people and demonstrate your expertise on a subject matter. Commentary gives people a chance to react. Becoming known as an approachable authority in your industry could do great things for you. Blog comments are a great opportunity to gather valuable business intelligence through polling people on their opinion as well.

Tips for Encouraging Comments and Overcoming Blog Comment Spam:

• When moderating comments, you might want to lessen the load by opting to do this for new visitors only (unless you’re getting a lot of inflammatory comments that you want to moderate). Do make sure someone at your company reads all comments, moderated or not.
• If you use WordPress as your blog platform, you’ll find a free free plug-in called Askimet. This can dramatically reduce blog spam and filter it so you don’t have to manually manage as much of it. Other techniques to minimize spam include adding a captcha (a program that requires manual entry of a confirmation code, which prevents software programs from auto-posting). You can also ban repeat spam or comment troll offenders by IP address and ban specific words as well.
• Write blog posts in a way that engages customers. Encourage commentary by adding an open-ended question to your blog posts in addition to your call to action, for example.
• Don’t just expect the visitors to talk amongst themselves. Participate in the discussions, too. This will show you’re interested in what people have to say and will encourage further communication.

As your blog gains popularity, you’ll begin to accumulate subscribers and your traffic will increase. You’ll also see new opportunities arise. Be sure to gather these new leads from your business blog. Base allows you to put a simple form in the sidebar of your blog that can engage customers to opt in to receiving information from you. Create new trackable leads with a simple CRM like Base.