Still feeling unsure? It’s YOUR blog. It’s okay, and necessary, for you to set boundaries and draw lines so that it stays a place you can express yourself and help your community. You’re allowed to delete a comment if you choose to. And you’re allowed to make the rules whichever way you want it.

1. Encourage & Reward Comments
I’m sure that if you’ve got kids you’re familiar with the concept of rewarding desired behavior. It works so much better than other parenting strategies. Have you thought about applying that in your business? Are you taking the time to appreciate and thank those who take time to leave a comment on your blog or interact with you?

Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you send handwritten cards to a few dozen (or hundreds) of people a month. That’d be time consuming and costly. Here are some easy ways you can show your appreciation.

2. Share Their Blog Posts
CommentLuv is a blog plugin that automatically adds a link below a comment to the person’s last blog post. So you’re giving them some promotion and link love.

3. Encourage Search Engines to Follow Their Links
By default, many Blogger themes adds something called “nofollow” to comment links which tells the search engines not to follow those links. You can read more about it here: make blogger comment link no-follw. But it’s much nicer to remove that so that by commenting your visitors are getting a helpful link back to their own websites. You can use the plugin “Do Follow” to remove that if you so desire.

4. Give Them More Visibility
By adding a comments widget to your sidebar you’re giving the comments more visibility. This means the commenter has more opportunity to be noticed on your site. You can setup a most recent comments widget (it’s built into WordPress so just check your available widgets) or a top commenters widget.

5. Respond to Their Thoughts & Engage With Them
I’ve been by more than one blog where the owner doesn’t bother to reply to comments, not even when the commenter asks a question about purchasing a product or service. Now I totally get that some of us are busy. But especially if someone wants to work with you, take time to answer them – or have your virtual assistant do it!

6. Tolerate Them Sometimes
In most cases many commentors will want to comment but will not do it the way you wanted it done, at the same time they are saying something real, sweet and good about your blog. All you can do is to edit such comments and approve them and letting them know that their comment has to be editted before it can be approved. Read more at http://www.oracleblogger.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss