You write your blog posts to help your audience solve the practical challenges they face. But did you realize that you can learn from your blog comments ways to make your blog and business more effective?

• Before You Start: You have a business blog with comments.
• Learning level: 4 | Creating Solutions
• Article Last Updated: Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Blog Comment Insights

When you first start a business blog, you write your heart out, click publish, and wait for the comments to roll in. Sometimes, you have a long wait. But after time, your blog begins to pick up readers, then regular readers, and soon your posts are getting comments.

Now the fun begins.

Here are 5 things you can learn from your blog post comments.

#1 Hot Button Topics

Occasionally, you will write a blog post that seems to have a life of its own. It gets tweeted, shared on Facebook, and you are drowning in comments. That’s all good stuff.

It means that your post hit a hot button topic with your readers, and they felt compelled to share your post with their friends, and give you their opinion on it. It doesn’t matter if they showered you with praise, or told you that you might be the anti-Christ.  What matters is that you found a topic that people really care about.

This is a topic that you should explore in more depth. But be careful as you start planning future posts. If you got a lot of negative feedback, make sure that your next post has rock-solid logic, and that you express your opinion in a respectful manner. It’s not about stirring the pot. It’s about giving people new ideas and new perspectives to consider.

#2 Dead Topics

While you are building your audience, don’t blacklist a topic because a post didn’t get any comments. But when you look at your blog as a whole, the posts with fewer comments may be telling you that these topics missed the target.

This is an opportunity to revisit the topic with a new post with a fresh take on the subject. This time, add something new to the mix, a story about your experience, more opinion, and a catchy title. If the new article doesn’t resonate with your audience, put that topic on slow rotation and write about it infrequently. Or don’t write about it for a while.

#3 Burning Questions

I love when people ask questions in blog post comments. There is no better way to find out what is on the hearts and minds of your readers. When someone asks a question, they show you how they see that topic. Armed with this information, you can see new ways to write about this topic, and new background information your audience wants to hear from you.

Answer their questions in the comments, but use their questions to write more engaging blog posts in the future, also.

#4 Timing

One common question with no easy answer is: what time of day and day of the week should I post? You can ask the same question for your blog, Twitter, Facebook, and other publishing platforms. You can get a clue about when people are reading your posts by seeing the time of their comments.

Combine the comment time with their time zone to get a sort of profile of when people are reading your posts. You can try shifting your publication date and time to right before your most popular reading time to see if you get increased (or decreased) readings.

#5 Reader Identity

I use the email addresses of my blog comments to figure out who is reading my posts. Did they use a business email address or a personal address? Can I tell from the top level domain identifier (.com, .co, .au, etc.) where in the world the commenter is located? Do I have a lot of commenters from the same country or region of the world?

Ask yourself if the information you provide is truly international. Is there a regional variation or twist that might interest your readers? Can you start to include examples in your posts from other parts of the world?

Your turn: What have you learned from reviewing your blog post comments? Share your experience and insights here.

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