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How to lose commenters on your blog in just three seconds

12 July 2010 | social-media | 1 Comment How to lose commenters on your blog in just three seconds

Whether you’re a veteran blogger or a new blogger, every blog has the capacity to turn commenters off in less than three seconds. Various practices are encouraged by coaches to capture leads, but in your effort to capture users or to maintain security, you could be losing business.

Take for example a highly respected industry blog out of London. After lurking for many months in my feed reader, I finally was drawn to an article of theirs that I wanted to engage in comments, but then the frustration began. After my comment went to moderation, I was prompted to go to my email, open a message to verify my email address, and finally, copy and paste a url into a new browser tab/window. Then, I was verified as a secure, worthwhile commenter.

Because I’m in the industry and I’m aware that this measure is taken to prevent security threats, I was only barely irritated. But I wondered how a non tech savvy person would react. Would they understand that they really did need to take that extra step for their comment to be seen? Would they be turned off by such a complicated procedure (I mean, if this is how complicated it is to comment on your blog, how complicated would it be to work with you if I hired you)?

How NOT to lose commenters on your blog

The reason commenting gets complicated is that businesses focus on security and/or lead capturing over valuable interactions. If your blog focuses on the value of each commenter and treats them naturally like you would in real life, you’ll keep more commenters than you lose. The cornerstone of community building is sincere interactions, so if you met someone on the street, would you shake their hand and then ask them to create a secret handshake before you were willing to speak with them?!? Of course not, so why do that on your blog?

Use an auto-captcha if you’re concerned with security and if you want all commenters to subscribe to your newsletter, simply add a line under all comments above the submit button to that effect, but don’t make commenters jump through hoops or you’ll lose them in the three seconds it takes them to evaluate whether or not the process is too complicated.

CC Licensed image courtesy of Katie Krueger via Flickr.com.

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1 Comment for this entry

  • Stephanie
    July 15th, 2010 on 9:47 am

    I can not tell you how many times I have tried to comment on a variety of pages only to get frustrated and hit the big X button on my browser. Great post!

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