Do You Moderate Your Blog's Comments?

As you may have noticed, my blog hasn't been exactly swarmed with readers' comments; I do have the odd visitor, just not a lot of contributions!

All the comments I received over the last 5 months have been from bloggers who had interesting things to say about my posts and I really appreciate these; however, about a week ago while I was playing around with the layout and settings of Smart Ways to Earn Money with Internet Junkie, I decided to start moderating my blog's comments.

Something funny happened then: the day after I had my comments moderated I received my first spammer's comment! I won't do him the honour of mentionning his name or website but I just want to say to him and other people leaving a useless comment with a link to their websites or blogs: "too late, mate!"

I did get another person trying to promote his blog on here today. I published his comment but I added my own reply, which I am quoting here:

Hi, I appreciate receiving comments on my blog but in future I'd rather if you didn't include links to your blog; if my readers want to access your blog through your name, they are free to do so. I am moderating all comments to this blog and will let this one slide but I will reject all future comments that include links to their websites or blogs; this is not personal, I am sure you can understand that I don't want my blog to become a playground for spammers.

It is very easy to moderate comments on your Blogger blog: go to "Settings" and click on the "Comments" tab; scroll down the page and when you see "Enable comment moderation?" check "Yes", enter your email address and all comments left by visitors on your blog will be sent to your email address so you can either publish or reject them.

This should summarize my position on spam comments pretty well. I suppose I shouldn't be complaining about getting more comments, I love comments! I guess that spam comments are just a small price to pay for being rich and famous (getting there slowly)!

Finding Blogs and Commenting to Increase Your Blog's Traffic

I never really had a method for finding and commenting on other blogs, although I know that commenting on blogs is one of the tools used for increasing traffic to a blog or website.

A few days ago, I wrote a post on Morachat and last night, since I did not have much time to work on my blog, I just typed "Morachat" in my Google toolbar and I found a few blog posts about Morachat; I read 4 of them and left some comments about Morachat. Hopefully, the authors of these blogs will visit my blog and maybe also some of their readers (I am less sure about this last one because the blog posts in question are not necessarily recent ones).

This gave me an idea for a blog commenting strategy: after writing a post, you can do a search on your last post's topic and leave comments on related blogs. This will also allow you to find more blogs you like; you can keep a list of the blogs you found this way so you can visit and comment often on them.

This method will make it easier to select the blogs you really like and link to them, after linking to them don't forget to write a comment on the blog to let the author know you are linking to them and if they like your blog, they might link to you too.

I have also started to apply this method to my articles on Associated Content, since you can leave comments on other writers' articles too. There are a lot of similarities between blogging and writing articles on Associated Content, but that is an idea for another day!