The Fastest Way to Kill Your Readership

I read a ton of blogs and I rarely unsubscribe from a feed. After all, if I like a blog enough to subscribe to it, I’ll generally want to keep reading it. I find, however, that my status as a regular reader of any blog can be quickly abolished based on a single factor.

Is it content? No. If I’ve subscribed, I already like the content. Is it regularity of posting? No. I’ll keep an infrequently updated blog on my feed list even if it only gets a post every few weeks. It’s not like there’s any added effort in doing so, and if I like the content, why not keep it?

No, it’s not what most people might expect. I find that the fastest way to lose me as a reader is to undermine the conversational nature of blogging by disallowing my comments.

I’ve run into this problem twice so far. For courtesy’s sake, I won’t call the offending blogs out by name. One was a game design blog and another was a marketing blog. On both, I posted a few well-thought-out, relevant comments. I didn’t write a dissertation or break any new ground; I simply shared my thoughts on the post topic.

Mind you, I wasn’t spamming for link love. I believe in blogs as a platform for conversation and I know how validated I feel when someone posts a comment, even a fairly mundane one. Besides, like most others, both of these blogs automatically tagged their comment links with rel=”nofollow”, so there was no link juice being passed anyway. In a word, my comments were innocent.

Nonetheless, for reasons I can only imagine, both of these bloggers took it upon themselves to moderate my comments out of their posts with some consistency. This wouldn’t have felt so bad if it didn’t seem like I was being singled out. Why were other commenters having their comments posted while mine were being denied?

In the end, I felt intentionally excluded and unsubscribed from the blogs in question. It really is a shame, since I genuinely enjoyed their content. When a blogger obviously doesn’t value what I have to say, however, it kills my interest in what they have to say. It’s like getting the cold shoulder; you just can’t help but return the sentiment.

So here’s my warning. If you want to garner and maintain a readership, don’t exclude comments that don’t deserve to be excluded. How do you determine if a comment is worth excluding? Here are some guidelines.
 

Good Reasons to Exclude a Comment

• Spam. This one’s a given, and the main reason most people enable moderation in the first place. Spammers are out to exploit, not contribute.
   
• Flamebait. If a commenter’s only goal is to get a rise out of you or your other readers, allowing their comments will only invite trouble. Then again, it can be fun to duke it out with flamers from time to time.
   
• Irrelevant. A post and its associated comments are a conversation. If a comment fails to contribute to that conversation in any meaningful way, that’s grounds for deletion.

Good Reasons to Edit (But Still Keep) a Comment

• Content rating. If your website is family-friendly, it’s perfectly fine to edit the content of a comment to fit into your rating guidelines, such as by removing profanity. Having a clear commenting policy can help avoid friction over this.
   
• Poor grammar. It’s a fact of life in the blogosphere; some people lack the eloquence or motivation to form proper sentences. If one or more grammar mistakes are all the stand in the way of an otherwise worthwhile comment, it’s perfectly fine to correct the error(s).
   

Bad Reasons to Exclude a Comment

• Disagreement. One kind of conversation is debate, and debates can make for very interesting reading. As long as it’s worded constructively (i.e. not flamebait), a comment that disagrees with your views is worth keeping most of the time. As an example, I’ve been having a great debate about the Second Amendment recently with a commenter who disagrees with my stance on the issue.
   
• Uninteresting. Some readers don’t have a point to make. They may just want to get a word in edgewise or voice support for an opinion. As I’ve pointed out, failing to include such comments can alienate the readers who make them.

In the end, the real measure of a comment’s worth is whether or not it adds any value for your readers. Comments that advance a conversation are great for everyone, but don’t forget that your commenters are part of your readership, too. If a comment isn’t great but doesn’t do any harm, consider the impact of excluding it. You never know; you may be turning away a regular reader by doing so.

It seems apologies are in order, at least for the owner of the marketing blog I mentioned. After a brief email conversation, it seems that my comments were getting caught in his spam filter. It seems I jumped the gun a bit. A word to the wise: If it seems like there’s no good reasons for your comments to be excluded, it might not be intentional.

That being said, it’s worth noting that cleaning and sorting your spam filter can help avoid this sort of confusion. I still stand by the rest of what I said as good advice, albeit misplaced in this instance.

SuccessPart2.Com » carnival of struggling bumbling newbies - April 28, 2007

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