I myself, I don’t try to disable comments on the communities and websites that I manage, I really don’t see the reason for doing it. You might be worried about spam, but nowadays there are tools that help to prevent spam completely – so that isn’t a problem either. I do find myself disabling the comments option on websites where I strictly list information and nothing else.
The website is going to serve only one purpose – to be a directory of whatever I want to put there.
Then there are bloggers who think that disabling comments might help with reducing load times, or make the website look more appealing. While I cannot argue with the statements, I do think that blog comments are an essential part of any community. It could be the fact that it takes a long time for new bloggers to start receiving reasonable amount of comments – for the future to be considered rewarding and useful.
Feedback
While it is okay to be a confident blogger, and understand why following others is a mistake – being overly confident can cause problems of its own. When you assume the perfect position – you are actually assuming the worst position.
Unless your blog is strictly personal, you are going to have to depend on user feedback in order to improve the quality of the website. It’s really that simple. You aren’t just writing for yourself, you are also writing for other people who help building your brand authority.
Hardly anyone these days bothers to use the contact form of a website, to get in touch and leave constructive feedback about a post or an idea. Instead, we use comments. It’s much more simple and time efficient. The web has bred into a little bit of a monster – with many comments being simple “thank you’s” instead of meaningful feedback.
The meaningful feedback we do get, we should take it seriously and try to improve upon it, as people who are willing enough to leave feedback are also the ones you would like to attract in the future.
Engagement
If you lack blog comments, you might want to consider improving your blog traffic.
Engagement is where you either like someone or you don’t. There is an incredible wall between the both, and in order to step from one side to another you have to somehow impact the user experience to a certain degree. Most of the time, people will like you and they will leave nice comments – occasionally there will appear the guy who knows everything best and he can easily be avoided.
You should keep your full attention and focus on the people who want to engage with you, people who want to discuss the topic further.
One of the reasons I implement the Disqus comment system was so that I could have nested comments and save people time entering their details. I’m not a firm believer in giving people the opportunity to receive a no-follow backlink from my blog. You can always link to your content if it’s relevant – that will have much higher conversion rate than anything else.
Read More: 11 Tips for Making Monthly Income Trough Blogging Successfully
You can always discuss something on a social network that you use to promote, but blog comments are always going to feel like home and when you start receiving a lot of them, it’s an incredibly positive feeling.
Problem Solving
This brings us to our last point that I want to discuss about how essential blog comments are and how important it is to maintain and treat them like any other part of your blog.
When you bring up an issue or an topic on your blog, you are most of the time trying to solve a problem, either for yourself or anyone who might need it from around the web. Sometimes the topic you are discussing is much broader and bigger than it might have seemed. This is where blog comments come in real handy – as you can begin solving problems for people who need more detailed instructions.
Very often, these problem solving cases lead to new post ideas which is even bigger benefit to you. It doesn’t even have to apply to your own blog. You could easily head over to any popular blog within your niche and start reading comments on it – the chances are you are going to overwhelm yourself with new content ideas, as people are always looking for solutions to their problems.
That is my ultimate tip to anyone who thinks that blog comments are not good or shouldn’t be bothered with. Everyone has different taste, I know mine, do you know yours?
Nice suggestions. This post encourage me to reply to my blog comment . Some time i was much lazy to reply my visitors .