Showing The Love; Commentors To Clients
One of the reasons we blog for business is to attract potential new clients. Most businesses can benefit from the added exposure of blogging, with the pull of a properly optimized network compounding that draw. If you are in a highly specialized, obscure, or frequently misunderstood field then informative posts on different aspects of your business can really help to draw in readers who may be only marginally interested or aware of you particular specialty. This month I have written two posts that discuss important aspects of Blogging For Business. The first of these posts is all about Engaging Your Site’s Visitors and examines the importance of creating a dialogue with your readers. The second of these posts, Capturing Your Client And Visitor Information, is about using forms to convert your readers into leads for your business. While forms are an excellent tool to convert your site’s visitors into clients, in this post I want to look at using the comment section to do the same thing.
It was pointed out to me in the comments section of the previous post that the information provided in that section is one of the best sources of lead information. In virtually all of the blogs I have read and websites I have visited, there is some form of comment section. The comment section allows for site owners to create that all important dialogue with their visitors which is the first step in converting visitors to leads.
The second step is capturing the contact information from those visitors. When a visitor wants to leave a comment on your post there are generally two things that are required, the commentor’s name and email address. Site’s that encourage commenting will often include a place for the commentor’s web address or URL. Some websites will use the Keyword Love plugin which allows the commentor to link back to their site via a keyword in place of the commentor’s name. Many sites will also use a plugin like Comment Luv to provide an additional link to the commentor’s last post. The Keyword Love and Comment Luv plugins are not necessary to capture commentor information but they do encourage commenting. It should also be noted that these plugins may not work in all instances on network systems like this real estate network.
You may be wondering why a commentor would leave their real information when commenting. In most instances if a visitor has been engaged by your site enough to make a comment they are looking to actually create a dialogue with the site’s owner. Additionally many commentors who have taken the time to read your article may not comment if there is not a backlinking system in place. As stated in my previous post, backlinking is a huge motivation for commenting. Another way to encourage visitors to leave real information is to reassure them that their information will not be shared or distributed with third parties. One of the biggest hurdles to people giving their name and email address is the fear that it will then be collected and sold to third parties who engage in spam campaigns. You absolutely do not want to distribute any of your commentor’s information to third parties unless this is a known practice that is explicitly consented to by the commentor.
Collecting and organizing commentor information for your own use is a way to network. Many people will bookmark commentor websites in order to visit them and get a feel for what the visitor is about. Bookmarking can easily be done either in their toolbar or using bookmarking systems like 
and 
. These bookmarks can then be used to visit commentor websites on a regular basis. By visiting their site and commenting on their posts the foundation of a network can be created. This networking process can build relationships that can lead to excellent client and referral sources; think social network without the network. If you blog for business, this is a prime reason you want your blog to be as commentor friendly as possible.
How do you use your comment section?
Posts
Another thing I’d like to express about me, I’m a 16-year extremely passionate blogger from Bangladesh. The computer I’ve been using since last few months has been borrowed from someone else. I am a school student and have no source of income. Internet is terribly slow here but still it’s costly. I am worried that I may not be able to continue my connection to the next month. It takes $10-$15 per month to use unlimited internet 24X7. I can’t bear the expense and that’s why I’ve taken an internet package limited to 1GB per month. That’s why I couldn’t work with images. I’ve turned off loading images in my firefox so that I can reduce data transfer.
Believe me I can stay starving but can’t stay out of Internet and blogging world. But I’m not that lucky to at least have a good-configuration computer and high speed unlimited data transferable Internet connection. I’m limited.
I’m sorry for the totally irrelevant comment. You might have noticed the appeal of rewarding me for the article I wrote [I called it as a reward. Used Buy Me A Beer plugin. Do notice at the end of the post]. I’m worried I would die before I can do something.