Reader Q&A: How to Respond to Blog Comments

This is a reader Q&A post.  Do you have a question you’d like answered?  Submit it here.

Tom from Blue Highways of America asks:

I’m relatively new to blogging and I’m very confused about some things. The author of Google Blogging for Dummies says that you should always acknowledge comments made about your blog posts. But she doesn’t explain how. A private email? Or an additional post saying “thanks” beneath the one in question?

Good question Tom, and you’ve just about answered it yourself.  There is no single, correct way to acknowledge blog comments.  Instead you can apply a variety of different methods depending on the comment you are responding to.

Here are three suggestions.

Reply to the Comment

The simplest and most obvious method is to reply directly to the comment.  Most blogs these days permit threaded comments where replies are shown immediately below the comment they are in response to, otherwise you can refer to the other commenter by name so that its clear who you are responding to.

Try to make your own comments on your blog as valuable as you would expect from your own readers.  It is easy to fire off a few quick “thanks” comments to your readers (I’m guilty of that myself), but if you take a few extra moments to write something more substantial you can keep the discussion alive longer.  And the more discussion that appears to be going on in your blog comments, the more other people are likely to leave comments too.

Respond With Another Blog Post

Every now and then someone will write a comment on your blog that takes the discussion deeper or even in a different direction entirely.  If you find yourself writing a huge reply to the comment it might be a sign that your response would be better as an entirely new blog post.

Aside from taking advantage of the free inspiration you can also interlink the two blog posts so that readers can click through and read more of your content, and also to help a little with SEO.

Reply With an Email

The third method is to send an email to the person thanking them for their comment.  You can take advantage of this opportunity to continue the discussion with them in private, which might even inspire some new blog post ideas for you.

If the commenter is someone who writes a blog that relates to your own you could also use an email response to propose such things as guest posting on each other’s blogs.

Do you have your own methods for responding to comments on your blog?  Share them in the comments below.

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