How to Handle Business Blog Comments

Comments are a big part of blogging. When ou blog for about six months to a year you should start getting some comments. With posts up just about every day and activity from you in social media you’ll start to build a community of readers that check out your site. They will leave comments and you’ll have to decide how to moderate things.

Here is how I’ve handled it on my personal blogs and with blogs of clients.

Don’t Let Mean People In Your Home

There is a difference between a negative comment and a mean comment.

Negative comments are okay to leave. If someone comes to your site and asks a questions that goes against what you said in the blog post or if they have a different opinion than you it’s okay to leave the comment. I’ve actually found that if you’re doing blogging the right way you’ll get these kinds of comments. The great thing is that if you leave them the people that love your company will come and back you up. You don’t even need to respond if you don’t want to.

A mean comment is someone that just goes off with little basis. You can kick them out of you home. I like that analogy because you don’t simply let mean people into your home. Think of you business blog the same way. If someone is getting out of hand just kick them out and delete the comment.

Try to Respond to Every Good Comment

Once you start getting a good amount of comments (within maybe a year or two of starting) you’ll have to make a decision to respond to comments or not. On CML I try to respond to as many comments as I can.

When people leave comments they are generally looking to get a response from the website owner. They want to get attention in some way. You can make their day by leaving a response and more than that you can actually start forming a relationship that could lead to a potential sale or something like that in the future.

I haven’t really seen too many sales come from comments, but what I believe is that by showing interaction with commenters you actually project well to those that sit back and read the articles. You’ll make more sales with the people that don’t comment when you reply to comments.

That’s how I feel.

Some comments, however, won’t warrant a response. I hate the comments that just say “great post!”. I know it’s nice to hear it once in a while, but there really is no point to leaving that comment. I ignore those type of comments. I don’t think they’re looking for a response at all.

Links In Comments

There are people out there that only leave comments on blogs because they want the link back to their site. This is a gray area in the blogging world. On one hand you want people to comment so you might think that letting them link back to their site is okay since they’re leaving content on your site.

I think if someone leaves a blatant promotional link in a comment it should immediately be deleted even if the comment is good.

The only type of link that should be left in comments is a link using the authors name. It’s not as promotional and people don’t pay attention to the link unless they really liked the person’s comment.

Conclusion

These are the general guidelines we use at Ghost Blog Writers for handling comments.

Do you think we’re doing it right?

You can agree or disagree in the comments below, of course.

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