Internet Marketing Strategies

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Decision Time: Do You Want Readers to Leave Comments or Not

One of the quickest ways to increase content on your blog is to allow readers to leave comments, but for this to be effective you have to leave prompt replies. During the initial growth phase of your blog, you will not receive many comments… The volume grows as your readership increases.

At some point you will get into a situation where the sheer volume of comments becomes too much to handle on your own. You will spend too much time answering comments and not enough time writing posts.

The problem is not just the replies to the posts you have just published; the problem is compounded by visitors who find your old posts in the search engine listings. You will have to reply to comments on posts you published a long time ago. If your blog receives thousands of visits daily, many of those visitors will want to leave some sort of comment.

This leaves you with two options to consider:

1) Don’t accept comments

While this might effectively solve the problem outright, your new blog is not going to grow very quickly.
If you are creating an RSS fed blog which will run with little or no intervention on your part, then you don’t want to accept comments. Nothing will ruin your blog’s reputation quicker than unanswered comments on each post…

2) Stop accepting comments to posts after a certain time period has elapsed

Use the Comment Timeout plugin by James McKay which will allow you to automatically close comments on posts after a predetermined period of time. It also has an option which allows you to keep comments open for longer on older posts if recent comments have been left.

All settings are made through the “Options / Comment Timeout” page of your WordPress control panel.
This plugin will allow you to stop comments being accepted by setting the time period to zero.

Until tomorrow folks,

Alejandro Reyes
916.947.2455

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