A common fear I hear expressed by small business owners who are thinking about starting a blog is that the number of comments that will be left on their blog will require an inordinate amount of time to manage and maintain. In my experience, both with my own blog and with small business owners that I work with, this just doesn’t happen on the typical small business blog.
Let me start by saying that you do have control of the comments that are posted to your blog. You can disallow them totally (although I don’t recommend this approach). You can also specify that comments are only visible after you approve them. So, you do have some options for controlling the comments that appear on your blog.
If you are the typical small business owner that I run into, your blog is probably not going to generate hundreds or thousands of comments a day. Depending on your audience, your subject, and your writing style, you may not get very many comments at all. I have been running my current blog for just over 12 months. I have about 180 posts that have been viewed 2,775 times in total and I have only received 27 comments (including 3 trackbacks, which are comments left on other sites that link back to mine).
The comments that you receive on your blog will fall into a few distinct categories – each requiring different amounts of follow up or maintenance work.
- Thank you and compliments – comments like "nice post", "thanks for the info", etc. These comments don’t require any work on your part unless you want to be polite with a "you’re welcome"
- Additions or Contributions – you will often receive comments along the lines of "you may want to check out this product" or "your idea also applies to this field". Again, you probably won’t be obligated to do any follow up for these type of posts. More than likely you will go check out what they are talking about learn something. Share what you learn with your customers and you become even more of an "expert".
- Questions – sometimes you will receive questions directly or indirectly related to a particular post on your blog. This is a great sign that you are establishing yourself as an expert in your subject matter. Don’t be afraid of "giving away" to much information. Even if the person you help out doesn’t become a customer, others who follow will see and appreciate your expertise.
- Criticism or Arguments – Criticism or arguments with your point of view are good so don’t shy away from them. And don’t leave them unanswered. I often find I didn’t make my point very well the first time so I need to clarify. Sometimes you will make a mistake – just apologize. If you disagree with the criticism or argument explain why. None of your customers or prospects expect you to be perfect. More often than not you will win more friends by demonstrating how you handle mistakes than you will by hiding them.
- Spam\Irrelevant comments– chances are you will get some spam on your blog. I get very few – these are the only types of comments that I ever delete from my blog.
- Other – I’m sure I’ve missed something
In my experience, the rewards of meeting people, finding new resources, and acquiring new customers that I would never have met without my blog far outweigh the amount of time I have spent maintaining the comments posted on my blog.
