Today’s post is written by JennyBeans:
JennyBeans is a fiction author, podcaster, editor and freelance writer from Northeastern PA. When she isn’t peddling audio and written fiction and poetry at The Inner Bean, she can be found sharing her thoughts on motherhood, parenting and family on KidWonderful.
I have been a writer as long as I could hold a pencil and piece letters together to make words. In high school I avidly shared my short stories and kooky novels with friends because no matter what the so-called experts say about writers writing for themselves, we all write with a reading audience in mind. Whenever I was given the opportunity to sit nearby while someone was reading one of my stories back then, I sat on the edge of my chair like a stalker gauging their reaction and waiting for them to finish.
If you have a personal website or blog, chances are you know exactly what I’m talking about. No matter what you write about, you hit the publish button on your dashboard, send those thoughts out into the world and start hitting refresh on your stats tracker to find out who, if anyone, is reading.
Commenting is one of the instant gratification perks of being a blogger. It offers your readers the opportunity to answer questions you may have posed, or relate their own personal experiences and stories with you. Unfortunately, the Internet is chock full of spammers who love to post useless nonsense on everyone’s website. Spam comments drive us as bloggers to put up every precaution in our power to ensure we eliminate as much spam as possible.
On the other hand, many of the precautions we take make it virtually impossible for our regular fans and readers to leave a comment. I have to tell you, if I need to do more than one back flip to leave a comment, I leave without speaking my piece and rarely look back.
If you’re worried about spammers taking over the comment area on every blog post, there are a few precautions you can take to ensure your regulars can still comment without a hassle.
- Moderate comments. Most blogging sites offer you the opportunity to preview every comment that comes in before it goes live to your site. The downside? You may find yourself sifting through dozens of spam comments to find the worthwhile contributions, but it’ll keep your blog relatively spam free and the readers who want to leave a comment happy. This will also let you turn off goofy features like Captcha that frustrate and annoy the avid commenter.
- Avoid requiring your users to sign up in order to comment. I can’t tell you the number of blogs I’ve personally opted not to comment on because I had no interest in being a member.
- If you use Blogger, allow readers multiple options for identifying themselves. Not everyone has a Google or Blogger account, and having to sign up for one or the other in order to leave a comment is a hassle a lot of readers would rather not bother with. Don’t forget, you can always moderate comments before allowing them to go live.
- Download and use Akismet. Akismet is a comment filtering system that can be adapted to nearly any blog system. If you’re not sure how to adapt it, you can join their developer’s community for help adapting it to your particular format.
You want people to read your blog, otherwise you wouldn’t be blogging. You also want people to comment. Don’t make your readers jump through flaming hoops on one leg before they can leave a comment.. Not only is it a turn off to have to work so hard to say, “I was here,” but there’s a strong possibility they may not come back to read further blog posts either.
Be comment friendly, and friends will comment.
Askimet: http://akismet.com/faq/
CAPTCHA: http://www.captcha.net/
Comments are the Feedback We Seek
Filed under Increasing Traffic, Spotlight of the Week {19 comments}I have been a writer as long as I could hold a pencil and piece letters together to make words. In high school I avidly shared my short stories and kooky novels with friends because no matter what the so-called experts say about writers writing for themselves, we all write with a reading audience in mind. Whenever I was given the opportunity to sit nearby while someone was reading one of my stories back then, I sat on the edge of my chair like a stalker gauging their reaction and waiting for them to finish.
If you have a personal website or blog, chances are you know exactly what I’m talking about. No matter what you write about, you hit the publish button on your dashboard, send those thoughts out into the world and start hitting refresh on your stats tracker to find out who, if anyone, is reading.
Commenting is one of the instant gratification perks of being a blogger. It offers your readers the opportunity to answer questions you may have posed, or relate their own personal experiences and stories with you. Unfortunately, the Internet is chock full of spammers who love to post useless nonsense on everyone’s website. Spam comments drive us as bloggers to put up every precaution in our power to ensure we eliminate as much spam as possible.
On the other hand, many of the precautions we take make it virtually impossible for our regular fans and readers to leave a comment. I have to tell you, if I need to do more than one back flip to leave a comment, I leave without speaking my piece and rarely look back.
If you’re worried about spammers taking over the comment area on every blog post, there are a few precautions you can take to ensure your regulars can still comment without a hassle.
You want people to read your blog, otherwise you wouldn’t be blogging. You also want people to comment. Don’t make your readers jump through flaming hoops on one leg before they can leave a comment.. Not only is it a turn off to have to work so hard to say, “I was here,” but there’s a strong possibility they may not come back to read further blog posts either.
Be comment friendly, and friends will comment.
Askimet: http://akismet.com/faq/
CAPTCHA: http://www.captcha.net/