Why Allow Comments?

Even with the headaches comments can cause, the chance to have a conversation with multiple readers in close to real time makes the Internet different from any other medium. Allowing comments also helps to make your blogging sharper and more accurate (your readers will let you know when you go astray), creates conversation among readers, fosters reader loyalty, and, most importantly, helps build a network of readers and bloggers. Isn’t that why you started blogging in the first place?

But be forewarned. It pays to have a thick skin if readers engage honestly. Some of these readers will tell you that you’re wrong. Some will disagree vehemently. You’ll be called names. Mark and Jerry both engage those posting challenging comments on their blogs as long as the tone is civil. If bloggers want others to listen to and be influenced by their views, presumably based on evidence and context, they have to accept that others can reasonably disagree. At its best, the blogosphere encourages discourse that moves beyond the food fight that too much of the give-and-take, particularly in politics, has turned toward in the United States.

Growing and Nurturing a Community of Commenters

Please excuse our lack of subtlety here, but sometimes you have to state the obvious: you can’t build a community unless you belong to a community. The community you want to belong to is one of people who research and write about or actively read and comment on topics similar to yours. If you’re writing a “locavore” blog—a “locavore” builds his or her diet around food grown locally—then you want to be active in the large community of healthy food bloggers and their followers.

Here are three ways to accomplish this:

1. Link to other blogs whose topics are similar. “Link love” is what bloggers call it. When bloggers look at what is known as the “analytics,” or readership data, about their sites, they can see who is linking to their blog. That’s how they discover who is writing on a similar topic. Other bloggers tend to surf to similar blogs to check them out. The “pingbacks” function in WordPress or Moveable Type helps you encourage such networking. When you link to another blog, your software sends a “pingback” to the blog you linked to, where it will be displayed as a comment.
2. Comment on blogs whose topics are similar. Make it a point not just to write comments on other blogs but to write comments that are intelligent and useful to that blog’s readers (and to the blogger). If you leave a comment on a blog post about a particular cricket bowler, add an observation that supplements the blogger’s. Always use the name under which you blog—if you blog as Charles Smith, then sign into the comment system as “Charles Smith.” And sign each comment.
3. Keep and update a blog roll on your blog. This is a list of links to related blogs that appears in a column either to the right or left of your blog posts. We recommend listing and linking to 5 to 10 of the best blogs you read.

The best way to draw comments, of course, is to write a well-researched, thoughtful, and eloquent post. Nothing beats quality. A few simple strategies, however, can help entice more comments.

1. End your post with a question for your readers. If you’ve just written a blog post reviewing the new Pharrell Williams album, you might ask: “Do you think this is Pharrell’s best album? Let us know in the comments section below.” If you prefer a different “kicker”, or ending, to your piece, you can ask the question in italics below the post. Don’t use a vague question of the “so whaddaya think?” sort, and don’t ask a question that can be answered with a simple yes or no.
2. Include interactive features, such as polls and quizzes. Invite your readers to participate in your blog. Polls and quizzes have long been standard features of major websites for the very good reason that they attract readers—and keep them coming back. If you’ve followed our advice, your blog will be more tightly focused than those on major websites so your readers will be more know ledgeable about your topic. That should improve participation. Several WordPress plug-ins allow users to create polls and quizzes, embed them, and keep track of and display the answers. Blogger and Tumblr, on the other hand, have few available plug-ins. You can, however, create a poll or a quiz on a free website and link to it. Surveymonkey.com is the most popular free website for creating polls. Quizzes are easy to build at the free website qzzr.com. Or you can just create a numbered list of questions in your blog post for readers to answer in the comments sections. The quiz plugins and quiz-making services referenced above provide easy-to-follow instructions.
3. Study your analytics to discover who reads and links to your blog. Publish an article in a magazine, and you’ll never know how many people read or thumbed through the lapidary prose on which you labored so long. All you can know for sure is how many copies of the magazine were printed and distributed. On the web, you can discover how many people visited your blog, in what part of the country (or world) they live, how long they stayed to read your blog posts, and a heck of a lot more. The term for these data is “analytics.” It is essential to add an analytics package to your blog and check these analytics frequently. The most basic (but still useful) is SiteMeter. Google Analytics is more sophisticated and gathers more information. Any analytics package will require you to add a few lines of HTML code to your blog’s coding. But don’t worry: You’ll get a step-by-step tutorial on how to do so.
4. Ask friends to help get the comments section going. We’re going to tell you a journalism secret. (Don’t spread it around, OK?) In the old days of print journalism, when a newspaper had just started up or an established newspaper approached deadline with a dearth of letters to the editor, friends and family were sometimes asked to write a letter or two. The idea was that those letters would get others to add their voices. When you start your blog, you can ask friends to do the same—as long as their comments are honest and respond to your blog post. A friend leaving a comment that reads, “Great blog post, Tom! See you Saturday night at Claire’s!” doesn’t help gain new commenters for your blog. This practice is ethical as long as you don’t tell those friends what to write or ghostwrite for them. That would be unethical.

When to Engage Those Who Comment—and How

1. Ignore trolls and spammers. On the Internet, a troll is someone who wants to start an argument or upset people by posting offen sive or mean-spirited comments. If, as we recommend, you moderate the comments, don’t waste your time sending angry emails to trolls. That’s what they want. Simply delete their comments from your queue. The same goes for spam: just delete it. Don’t try to track down the spammer. Spammers know how to use the Internet to hide their identities. If anti-spam plug-ins are available for your blogging software package, consider using them to lessen your spam-spurred headaches.
2. If a commenter finds a mistake, correct it and thank the person. It happens to all bloggers: We make mistakes. Perhaps we spell a name wrong, or, relying on memory (or inaccurate information we found on the Internet), list the wrong bass player in the personnel of a recording session for a famous pop tune. After you have confirmed a mistake, go back into your blog post and correct the error. Put an asterisk next to what you fixed, and, at the bottom of the post, tell your reader about the correction you made: “*This post originally stated the bass player on The Roots’ Undun album was Owen Biddle. Mark Kelley played bass on the album.” Keep this in mind: By pointing out your mistake, your reader is helping you maintain a more accurate and reliable blog. So when someone helps you, say thank you with a few words in the comments section beneath the original comment: “Thanks! I appreciate it. I’ve fixed the mistake.”
3. Respond to comments with interest and respect. Continue the conversation the commenter started. Don’t just respond with a “thanks for reading” or “I agree.” You can ask the commenter a question based on what he or she wrote. That’s a good way to get a conversation going. If commenters elaborate on a point you make, follow the thread of the conversation and expand on your blog post and the readers’ comments. Turning the comments section into a respectful and engaged conversation encourages readers to return frequently to see what new comments have been added. Once again, the key word and concept is respect. The comments on your blog may anger you, sting you, or make you feel dumb, but if you’re going to be writing on the Internet for all the world to read, you need to be a grown-up and have a thick skin. Nothing drives readers away faster than insulting their comments.
4. Email your commenters. If you decide to require readers to register before they can comment, you’ll have their email addresses. An effective way to establish a relationship with a commenter—and to help make that person a loyal reader—is to respond not only in the comments section, but also with a short, personal email. You could write something like this: “Thanks for reading the blog and taking the time to comment. I really appreciate it. If you have any ideas for blog posts or any other suggestions for making my blog better, let me know.”

Dealing with Spammers, Bots, and Other Headaches

Spam defines unsolicited and unwanted messages sent in bulk to email accounts, websites, blogs, and other online social media sites. It is usually advertising.

Spamming is good business for those who do it because it costs almost nothing: All spammers need is a list of web or email addresses, which can either be bought cheaply or “harvested” from the Web by special software. Spammers can send 10,000 emails for less than $100.

The increasing sophistication of spam filters has made spammers’ jobs harder, but spammers are a determined and knowledgeable lot. Computer security experts estimate about 110 trillion spam emails are sent every year. Make sure your blogging software’s spam filter is turned on. Most blogging software now includes a built-in spam filter, which can usually be found on the “Settings” page. These, however, are far from invulnerable. Your email account probably has a spam filter, too, but you still get spam in your inbox every day.

An Internet bot is a piece of automated software that uses what is known as “spidering” to continually search the Web at extraordinarily high speeds and gather data. A bot can be programmed to repetitively search the Internet for the URLs of comment sections of websites and blogs and gather all the URLs into a database. Then a spammer can easily post spam messages to all the comments sections in the database.

Don’t be quick to casually dismiss the harm comment spam can do to your blog. You may think readers will recognize it for what it is and ignore it. But spam almost always includes links, and those links are the source of the harm to your blog. Google’s search algorithm, for example, takes a dim view of spam links, wherever they appear on a website or a blog, and your blog will appear much farther down the list in a Google search.

What’s more, spam comments send the same bad message to your readers as sporadic posting does. They’ll likely conclude you’re not much interested in maintaining a good blog. They also might conclude that the comments section doesn’t matter to you. Once you lose readers, they don’t come back.

Moderating your comment section is the best (although most laborious) way to keep spam off your blog. But there are a few other things you can do if you decide not to moderate.

Akismet is widely considered one of the best plug-ins to fight spam on WordPress. Other blogging platforms, such as Blogger and Tumblr, are much less effective in blocking spam.

Add-On Software for Managing Comments

Many websites and bloggers either use special software to manage comments, or route comments through a comment management website.

The best comment management website is disqus.com, which calls itself “the web’s community of communities.” Disqus is free, and it provides a clean, powerful comment system that can be added to Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, or any other website. It allows you to authorize multiple comment moderators, and easily allows a blogger to share all comments on social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter.

The comment management website web.livefyre.com is new and has many of the same features. Both have spam filters. The comments management website intensedebate.com gives you the option to be notified by email when someone else comments. It also has the strongest spam filter of the three.

Conversations beyond the Comments Section

In announcing that popularscience.com was shutting off its comments section, online content director Suzanne LaBarre gave readers alternatives. “There are plenty of other ways to talk back to us, and to each other,” she wrote. “Through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, livechats, email, and more.”

Northeastern University’s Dan Kennedy said he is finding that the most interesting comments on his blog post now come not from the comments sections, but from social media. Kennedy has a Facebook account set to “public,” and said, “I post a link back to my blog on Facebook, and I get many more comments and higher-quality comments.”

He speculated as to why.

“Facebook does require real names,” he notes. “And I think people are in a different mood when they’re on Facebook. ‘Here’s a picture of a cat.’ ‘My wife and I just had a nice dinner at a new restaurant.’ People aren’t in sociopathic mode on Facebook.”

Relying on Facebook, however, does give him pause, noting that there are “dangers we don’t even understand in turning over a big part of our platform to a huge corporation that has its own agenda.”