Online Marketing Blog

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Dear “SEO Consulting Services New York” and you too “Starting A Home Business”,

I have an admission to make: I don’t like comment spam. You are comment spammers. Our readers don’t like you. I don’t like you. You’re not welcome here.

Our Akismet filter has been doing a good job of filtering out spam and our commenting filters within Disqus catch most of the non-automated spammy comments. But they still persist. Most people active online have real names (obvious I know, but stay with me). If they don’t use their real name, it’s popular to use a “handle”.   I can see that it might be reasonable for some people to have a few different handles, but for the most part, singular identities are the norm.

As blogs grow, and new content gets created, old blog posts can quickly get lost in the archives. As much as bloggers try to keep everything organized, it’s hard to ensure that all posts get the exposure they deserve. However, there are ways to help ensure that older posts get additional exposure.

1. Related Posts

On individual post pages, add links to other related posts. This shows visitors that there is more content on your blog that might be of interest to the reader. I’d suggest showing 5 posts as it gives a little variety without giving to many options.

Tip: Try out the Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in to integrate related posts into a WordPress blog.

A while back we covered a plug-in called Subscribe To Comments.  It’s a great way to ensure that when visitors comment on your blog posts, they receive follow-up comments and stay a part of the conversation.

After using Subscribe To Comments for over a year, there was one major issue, fake email addresses.  Whether they are from people who didn’t want to leave their real email address, or from spammers, the number of bounce backs can become overwhelming.

The good news is there are developers out there that have taken the Subscribe To Comments plug-in to the next level.  They require a user to validate their email address before subscribing to the comments.  This ensures that they wanted to subscribe and that their email address is valid.

Moderator is an Adobe Air application that allows you to peek into your WordPress blog and manage any comments that are awaiting moderation.

You can see who wrote the comment, their email, Gravatar icon, what they said, when they said it, and then you can decide to accept, spam or delete the comment.  The settings also allow you to set the refresh interval and hide Gravatars if you’d like.

Another nice feature is that there are dock and system tray notifications of the number of unmoderated comments.

At this time, Moderator does not allow you to do a whole lot, but they plan on adding the ability to see all comments, reply to comments, manage multiple blogs comments, and get desktop pop-up notifications of new comments.

It’s the end of the year and a lot of blogs are now putting out their top posts of the year posts.  But how does one find out which are the top posts on their blog?

Here are a few ways you can find out which posts are tops on your blog.

• Number of Comments – One easy way to see if a post is popular or not is to look at the number of comments.  The more comments, the more engaged people were with the post.  The downside here is that a lot of people may read the post, but only a few may actually comment.

Every blog comes with comments and pretty much every blogger is basing their success on comments. Sure, they may say they don’t, but when you have no comments you feel like you’re just talking to yourself. So how do you get comments?

1 – Write posts that are conversational and something that people can relate to. If you write posts in a way that there feels like there is no room for discussion, then comments will be harder to get.

My wife is great at making posts people can relate to. She put out a post two years ago when she broke her leg and is closing in on 1000 comments from others that have broken theirs. She’s not a marketer, or a PR person, just an average blogger who happened to write in a way that people felt compelled to comment.

I just got done posting a comment on David Naylor’s blog and I’d like to stay involved with the conversation, however there is no ability to say connected via email or feed. This then disconnects the commenter’s from the discussion unless they remember to come back.

A quick fix would be to enable comment notifications. WordPress has a great plugin called Subscribe to Comments which will allow all readers to subscribe to any post. If you subscribe to a post’s comments, you’ll get notified via email when a new response has been added. This is great if you asked a question or made a comment that someone else responds to. It also brings the visitor back to your blog to where they might participate in more discussions.

There have been plenty of times I’ve commented on other blogs, only to forget where I was. Days later I think to myself ‘I wonder if anyone commented on my comment’. To bad I don’t remember where I was so I can’t go back and check.

There is also times where someone asks a question in the comments, we answer it and never know if the user actually saw that we answered their question.

Granted, every post has a comment RSS feed but you then end up with a cluttered feed reader. So there has to be an easier way to keep your comment conversation alive by notifying previous comment authors. Well there is.