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joi, 7 iunie 2012

Bloggertone updates

5 Reasons Why Blog Comments Don’t Matter

Posted: 06 Jun 2012 03:34 PM PDT

It doesn't matter if you're a teenage girl or a Bolingbrook dentist, when you're blogging, you want someone to be reading—and one of the surest ways you can tell people are listening is when they respond. Yet, truth be told, for a lot of business blogs, the comments don't come.

While stories about first dates and dessert recipes tend to draw responses on personal blogs, articles about a Chicago electrical contractor don't. What does this mean? If your business blog doesn't see a lot of discussion in the comments, don't be discouraged. Here are some reasons why for certain blogs, comments don't matter that much anyway.

# 1. Comments Don't Fit Every Subject Matter

As Corbett Barr writes at Think Traffic, the same blogger could write simultaneously at two different sites about two different topics, each of which draws the same readership of more than 30K visits a month, and one will see a lot of comments and one won't.

That's because some topics drive conversation, and some don't.
In the specialized realms of many niche topics, the readers interested in the subject matter won't be the readers who want to comment—that's OK.

Better to focus on readership than comments, and if your stats show high readership, don't worry about it.

# 2. More Traffic Doesn't Equal More Comments

Most people assume, when they come to a site for the first time, that comments are a good indicator of how many people are reading. But here are the facts:

Only a small percentage of blog readers will ever comment on a site.
It's true your topic may not be one that draws discussion, but even with an easily popular topic, it's only a small percentage of readers who leave responses.

Rather than looking at comments as an indication of blogging success, look at traffic—or better yet, new business that's come from it. Those are more reliable metrics.

# 3. Comments Are about Discussion

Think about it: what is the point of comments really? To see who's reading? To gain validation? There are other ways to track your readership, as well as to know someone's listening—analytics and stat checkers, for example. In truth, that's not what comments are meant to measure.

Comments are supposed to be about discussion and conversation: readers want to ask questions, add thoughts or create a dialogue about something written. So if you're writing about a topic that doesn't provoke discussion, you likely won't see huge comment numbers.

# 4. Comments Are Not the Only Form of Discussion

Another reason people focus on comments is because they are thought to measure engagement—and isn't that the whole point of social media? Yet comments are not the only way to measure engagement or community. Sometimes interested readers will engage in other ways:

they might email you,
click through to your main site,
subscribe,
make a purchase,
join a mailing list or something else.

Likewise, some people feel more comfortable engaging on other mediums like Facebook, Twitter, etc., so you may receive feedback there instead.

As Lorna Sixsmith writes in a previous Tweak Your Biz post, "As long as you are getting feedback [or, more importantly, results] for your content by means of sales/leads/tweets/comments/facebook/verbal, it doesn't matter which form it comes in."

# 5. Comments Are Not the End Goal

Maybe you're blogging to enhance your brand, maybe to gain authority, maybe to generate new leads. But in every case, your end goal is to build your business, increasing leads and sales and profits, not to get comments.

Try to remember this when you wish for responses—because comments don't equal more profits and comments were never the end goal. A post with 10,000 comments doesn't mean much if it never translates to a single sale.

What do you think? Are there other reasons comments might not matter on a blog? Are people commenting less now? What else makes a difference?

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