Interacting with your readers is one thing that makes a blog a tight community. As what has been said a thousand times, blogging is a two way process, providing something, and getting feedback. So in short, you cannot just provide good content and then take a nap. Your readers sure have their say, maybe they couldn’t understand something or want more clarifications. Either way, this is where replying to them takes place.
While I do reply to 15-35% of comments in this blog, I think replying to each and every comment is silly! Why? Simply it’s because you really don’t have to most of the times. I find it ridiculous when a blogger responds to all comments (including trivial comments). I read Neil Patel’s blog and to be frank I enjoy reading it. But I just don’t get why he needs to reply to all comments he receives. I also have done a guest post on Yan’s blog about reputation management. I was asked by him as well to reply to every comments, so I did (not all comments though). Anyway I know 60% wouldn’t agree on me but I just think I have these 4 reasons why I think it’s silly and here they are:
- Not all comments add value – Comments like “been here, nice blog” or “thanks for this informative post” are no way can be considered as useless comments. In fact, it always feels good when someone finds your article great. But, it doesn’t add value! I feel I could always go by not saying “you’re welcome”. Depends on my mood, though. 🙂
- 85% don’t even get back to your post – The truth about bloggers is that, they bounce so fast. I mean because they want to comment on as many blogs as they can, they don’t really pay much attention to the post and would just rather agree on it immediately or say thank you. So because of it, they wouldn’t even be able to read your reply. In this case, I always look whether someone is subscribed to the comments via email (always make sure it’s unchecked). In that way, I would know if the guy is really waiting for a reply or not.
- It inflates your no.of comments per post – In my previous post about whether comments could justify the success of the blog, I tackled that because some of the bloggers reply to every comments, it makes their blog’s community so huge. I’m not really against it but I think it can have a negative impact on a blog because the blogger may have been wasting his time replying to all comments instead of promoting his blog more.
- Face it, not all your posts can be liked! – Well in my blog’s case, I have a ton of personal posts rather than helpful posts. I understand that by posting something about my crush, or my school life, it would tune out some of the readers. You see, people always expect something from your blog. If they are into blogging and they think you could help them but suddenly they’ve read an affiliate marketing article, it’s very likely that they wouldn’t get it and won’t respond. Same with contest posts. They rack a hundred comments but that doesn’t justify the popularity of a blog.
Overall the number of comments is really a nice way to dress your blog up and have a nice community. It attracts readers, advertisers and so on. But I think it goes more than just that. If you could possibly work more on other important things that would benefit your blog then that would be nicer than just wasting your time replying to each and every comment, even though you know its just a spam. What do you think? Or maybe am I missing something?
Most people and friends who just have recently started a blog normally ask me “why is my blog not getting comments? I look at my Analytics and I see the traffic but no comments” I responded then “time will come and just be patient”. But then at the back of my mind there are a lot of things going on so I decided I need to post my thoughts here. Ok, getting in into the number of comments into blogs, most people, I think are so wrong into thinking that the number of comments to blogs justify how successful a blog is. Although comments are for sure one of the things to look at when analyzing a blog, I think it only plays a very small percentage on it. I am now blogging for almost a year overall and about 7 months with a blog kinda related to internet marketing and make money online and I really have seen it all with this niche.