Addressing those who comment: The wrong ways

As promised, this is the fol­low up to a pre­vi­ous arti­cle “”. While it may be fairly obvi­ous to most of you how to talk to peo­ple who com­ment on your blog, it might not be to oth­ers. This post is kind of tar­geted at newer blog­gers. But you should still read it no mat­ter how good of a blog­ger you are, you may learn some­thing new.

To sum­ma­rize what we cov­ered last time, we found out that to address those who com­ment your blog the right way would be to respond to their com­ments, address them by their names, and ask ques­tions. Those are just some of the tips I shared with you that I believe are the qual­i­ties of good dis­cus­sion through comments.

1. Get­ting the obvi­ous out of the way: A bad way to talk to your com­men­ta­tors is by not even respond­ing to them

Who saw that com­ing? But it’s some­thing I can’t leave out as it’s the most impor­tant thing I want to drill into your head. Talk to every­one. They were great enough to come to your blog and com­ment on it, so just reply to what they had to say. It doesn’t have to be a para­graph long reply, just a few sen­tences that show you actu­ally care. It is pos­si­ble that your com­ment won’t be replied to (or even seen) by that one per­son, but it makes you look pretty friendly to others.

What’s worse than not respond­ing to any­one at all?
Yes, there is some­thing worse than not reply­ing to your com­men­ta­tors. It may be just me, but I think it’s worse to reply to a only a few peo­ple than it is none at all. I know you may think it sounds crazy, but think of it from my point of view:

I com­mented on a blog a few nights ago. I wrote a  fairly decent com­ment, was curi­ous to see what they pub­lisher had to say. The blog pub­lisher goes over com­ments and (hope­fully) reads them all and instead of reply­ing to every­one, they only com­ment to a few peo­ple. The per­son before me and after me got replied to, but I didn’t. Now, I felt a lit­tle annoyed but I didn’t do any­thing about it. It shows that the per­son who runs the blog is either lazy, or just doesn’t care much about the com­mu­nity that they would not include some­one who had a valid opinion.

So if you look at it from that per­spec­tive, do you think I would ever com­ment on that blog again? Appar­ently my opin­ion wasn’t valid to that blog­ger so there was no use in even reply­ing to me. How would you feel if that had hap­pened to you?

An easy way to reply to every comment…

If you have your com­ment sys­tem set up like I do, you will have to man­u­ally approve com­ments from new peo­ple before they go live to your blog. As you approve the com­ment to go live onto your blog, if you look over to the right a lit­tle bit you will see a link that says “Reply” (Word­Press 2.7)

Sim­ply click that link and you will be able to write a reply to that com­ment with­out even leav­ing your admin panel. This will save you a bunch of scrolling, and is very easy to use.
reply­ing to their com­ments try­ing to sell a product

2. You flood your com­men­ta­tors with affil­i­ate links

Mak­ing money is great and all, but you have to be care­ful how you do it. If you are engag­ing some­one in a con­ver­sa­tion, don’t try to sell them a prod­uct. There is a good chance that they will lose respect of you because you are just prov­ing that you’d rather make some money instead of a new friend. Why should you feel the need to put those affil­i­ate links in your com­ments when you can prob­a­bly just throw them in a few times in your posts?

EXCEPTION: Yes, there is an excep­tion to this. If some­one asks for a rec­om­men­da­tion on a prod­uct that will help them, then feel free to throw an affil­i­ate link at them (pro­vided that link will be use­ful to them and they ask for it). It’s like a “help me, help you” situation.

3. Going mod­er­a­tion crazy

You can over mod­er­ate. Hav­ing con­trol is fun, and I have seen it on count­less forums and even blogs. Peo­ple who can’t han­dle the power abuse it. How can it be abused?

• Delet­ing non-spam com­ments (all com­ments that aren’t spam should be published)
• Edit­ing out com­ments that don’t need to be edited (excep­tion: foul lan­guage, error/grammar mistakes)
• Telling peo­ple to get back on topic. Don’t be harsh about this. Some peo­ple tend to stray from the orig­i­nal topic (at least I know I do some­times). Let them say what­ever, reply to it and just ease them back on track. It’s not a big deal when things get off topic, but if it gets really bad then let them know they’re going off topic in a calm, but author­i­ta­tive manner.
• Not approv­ing com­ments that dis­agree with you. Approve EVERY non spam com­ment. Even if they dis­agree with you. Opin­ions are so strong, and they can cre­ate so much buzz. It sucks when every­one agrees with you. Encour­age peo­ple to share their thoughts — even the neg­a­tive ones. You can def­i­nitely learn some­thing from some­one elses point of view.

There are plenty of blogs that totally abuse their mod­er­a­tion pow­ers. It’s lame because it really pre­vents some peo­ple from get­ting their opin­ion heard. Don’t be like that, encour­age all point of views and embrace them. It makes a hell of a dis­cus­sion, and you might learn some­thing new.

4. You don’t use nested comments!

Trust me on this, you need to have nested com­ments on your blog. Don’t know what nested com­ments are? Just check out the com­ments on any recent posts here at Blo­gus­sion. You will see a com­ment with a box inside of it with a reply — that is what nested com­ments look like. They are great because it makes your com­ments orga­nized, and it is eas­ier to reply to peo­ple and start a con­ver­sa­tion between a group of people.

If you don’t use nested com­ments, look into it imme­di­ately. If you use Word­Press 2.7, you already have all you need built in. You may just need to edit your comments.php file to make it work if you upgraded from an older ver­sion of Word­Press. The good news is that a lot of free/premium now work with Word­Press 2.7 so you won’t have to worry about edit­ing any files to make nested com­ments work. If you don’t have a theme com­pat­i­ble with the new nested com­ments fea­tures, check out Otto’s post on how to make your com­ments nested in Word­Press 2.7.

Con­clud­ing Thoughts

So if you have not read our first part of this mini series, check out and let us know what you have learned in the com­ments sec­tions below. Keep in mind that no com­ment is a stu­pid (except for you spam bots out there) and every­thing will be read and replied to.

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