Comments on: Love Your Commenters

By: LGR

LGR — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:14:16 +0000

Thanks for the add on Twitter and for stopping by. I have been thinking of writing an new post on nofollow and text links actually. I had a client ask me about them the other day.

By: Heidi @ Carolina Dreamz

Heidi @ Carolina Dreamz — Wed, 21 May 2008 10:10:17 +0000

I first learned about removing NO FOLLOW here, at http://tinyurl.com/4zbmeb

Happy to find your blog. I added you to my twitter.
~Heidi

By: LGR

LGR — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:39:56 +0000

Rudy I am not sure what you mean? I know I use the Better Comments Manager plugin and it makes it easy to continue conversations even on old posts. Often I do have to refresh my memory about the post but that has nothing to do with replying. One of these days I will install the notify on new comments plugin so the people leaving comments can get new updates by email, but there is an RSS feed for each post that people can subscribe to. It is not very noticeable, I should make it easier to see and subscribe.

By: Rudy

Rudy — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:19:26 +0000

Now, how many people actually reply to new comments in an old post?

By: LGR

LGR — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 21:23:00 +0000

Bes, excellent point! Those people that are making a living blogging should make it a point to respond to comments. It is their job.

I was just reading on thereasoner.com a great post entitled "Are you treating your blog commentors like slaves?". It has a great section about how to repay your commenters. I would like to repay by removing the nofollow attribute on the comment authors link. Now if I can just find out how to do that with Blogger.

What are some ways that commenters can be compensated for their efforts?

By: Bes

Bes — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:23:00 +0000

Good point. Commenting is indeed a way to carry on a conversation. In my view, commenting is part of blogging too.

I think writers should consider it their most important task to interact with their readers/commentors, and to carry on conversations. A comment left by any person is their unique work; we have to respect it and interact with it, since that person created that work as a response to our work.

Interacting with other people's works on outside blogs is important too, as staying only on our blog somehow makes us enslaved in a shell which limits outside interaction.

I also would not want to continue helping someone, through comments, who deletes comments at will or disrespects readers simply because of the fact that people have different opinions.

Inspirationbit [above] brings up a good point: many blogs get a lot of comments everyday. I think bloggers should make it their jobs to not only post everyday but to respond to every comment. Many bloggers are already paying other bloggers to guest post for them; how about paying bloggers to respond to all commentors also? It is like a customer service situation, where bloggers are making money through community interaction but they are not responding to comments due to the number of comments they receive.

By: LGR

LGR — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 16:58:00 +0000

It is a conversation. Granted I post some straight forward information sometimes, but there is always more information that I can learn on topics and I hope readers will enlighten me when they have information on the topic.

By: inspirationbit

inspirationbit — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 16:00:00 +0000

I completely agree with you. Why post something if you don’t want to get engaged in a conversation with your reader? On the other hand, I do realize that it may be difficult to keep up with the comments if your blog is so popular that it gets 50 or more comments a day, but even then I’ve seen many popular blogs where the owners take time to respond to comments, and that’s what makes their blogs even more popular.

Personally, I didn’t come across of my comment not being posted or deleted, but there were many occasions when my questions in the comments or my points weren’t addressed.