We’ve all been there. You’re so excited to get that notification that there is a comment on your blog only to find it’s one of those annoying spam comments. Is moderating blog comments really worth your hard work, time and effort? You may have heard about some popular online marketers who have disabled their blog comments entirely due to a high volume of spammy and low-quality comments, and you’re wondering whether you should now do it too.

How to Decide Whether or Not to Disable Comments: Here’s the Debate

The reasons why you may want to allow blog comments or not is perfectly summarized in this post found on Fizzle and where two popular online marketers Pat Flynn and Everett Bogue debate the issue.

Pat argues that you should allow comments on most blogs, while Everett argues that you should seriously consider turning them off.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what each had to say…

The Argument For Pro Blog Comments

In Pat’s argument, he states that,

“Without comments, a blog isn’t really a blog. To me, blogging is not just about publishing content, but also the two-way communication and community building aspects behind it.”

The benefits he states for allowing blog comments are:

·       Blog comments provide a form of social proof

·       Blog comments help you to understand what your readers want you to write about

·       Responding to comments helps you to deepen your relationship with your readers

·       The act of commenting theoretically increases the likelihood that the user will also engage in other ways, such as subscribing to your newsletter, or even making a purchase down the road

The Argument Against Blog Comments

In Everett’s argument, he states that,

“To say a blog is not a blog when it doesn’t have comments can’t be true, because my blog works just fine without comments. My ideas are definitely not perfect, but at a certain point I had to make a decision about where my focus would lie. Did I want hordes of Internet randoms deciding where my ideas needed to go, or did I want to proactively choose the opinions that would influence my ideas?”

He goes on to say that rather than spending endless amounts of time sifting through low-quality comments on his blog, he now has time to build meaningful relationships with individuals on social media.

So is it time to give those comments the boot?

Rather than dismissing blog comments entirely because it can be seen as as outdated spammy link building content (and it can be when done wrong), maybe you should reimagine it as a type of community engagement.

They can be engaging and add value — though they require slightly more work than they used to require.

Here are some Benefits of Blog Commenting Links

Leaving one or two comments per day can lead to extremely positive results such as:

·       It can bring more traffic to your website. If this is your goal, your best bet is to comment on blogs that get a lot of traffic and are in your industry or niche.

·       Build that reputation of yours. You can use blog comments to build your personal brand. Just be sure to use your real name and an image of yourself if the blog allows it for your profile. If you’re using anchor text or keywords as your name, you’re doing blog commenting completely wrong.

·       Position yourself as an expert. People will get to know who you are as you demonstrate your expertise on relevant topics. You can achieve this by lending a helping hand or just agreeing with someone.

·       Builds inbound links. If you take the time to comment on two blog posts per day, with a backlink back to your website (even if the links are classified as nofollow), the end result will be roughly 60 backlinks per month, or 720 per year.

·       Leads and conversions. If you can attract more visitors to your site, you can potentially convert them from visitors into leads. And those leads could turn into customers or clients and actual revenue.

As for ranking? Well years ago, the right comment on the right blog may have a powerful way to improve your rankings. Today, it’s not nearly as effective as it once was.

Some Top Blog Commenting Tips:

From finding high-quality sites and engaging with commenters like a pro, here’s my best blog commenting tips:

o   Acknowledge the author by name and add a compliment.

o   Sprinkle in valuable information you took from the article, while adding additional data from your expertise vault that may contribute to the post.

o   If you add a link, it needs to be relevant and add value to the post or discussion.

Remember to keep your blog comment short and sweet.

Finally, and most importantly, when it comes to blog commenting, you should follow one crucial rule, no matter what:

Make your comment valuable to the post and the discussion.

A comment that has nothing to do with the post itself, no matter how long and intelligent it may sound while writing it won’t help you one bit.

You have to actually read the post and make your comment a response to the post, or a response to another commenter’s comment. It has to make sense! You want to be seen as a valuable resource rather than spammer!

Want to learn how to get your site on the 1st page of Google? Read this post here or grab my free guide here.