[Mistakes #6] Five Common Comment Form Mistakes … and How to Fix Them

Posted: 10 Jan 2014 04:58 AM PST

This is the sixth post in our Mistakes series, a guest piece from freelance writer and blogger Raspal Seni. (You’ll find his bio at the bottom of the post.)

Your blog’s comment form is how your blog visitors communicate with you and other readers, perhaps to ask questions or share something.

The more comments on your blog, the better! Comments show that your blog is popular, give you valuable feedback, and even help turn your blog visitors into regular readers. But what if commenting on your blog is difficult? Visitors may not bother, and might not even visit your blog again.

These are five common comment form mistakes which, if you fix, more of your blog visitors will become regular readers of your blog:

Mistake #1. Not Even Using Your Own Comment Form!

This is a mistake many bloggers make. They work hard on their blog, write great posts, share them on social networks, but then don’t reply to comments.

This doesn’t make your blog look very welcoming. Traffic to your blog will decline as new visitors may think you’re not interested in your readers.

Comments are currency for your blog, as Chris Brogan says. If you reply to them, more and more visitors will become regular readers.

Fix it: Visit your blog and reply to any unanswered comments, then do this regularly. You don’t have to reply to each and every comment, but at least reply the ones which directly ask you something.

You can even reply to more than one comment in a single comment, like Ali and Daniel do here on DBT.

Mistake #2. Using a Captcha System

This is one of the mistakes which I made when starting my first blog: using a difficult captcha system.

I realised later what a mistake this was, especially recently during my 31 days at the Ultimate Blog Challenge, where I’d get irritated, when I had to read and type a difficult captcha to comment on other people’s posts.

Once, I even lost a long comment I had typed, due to typing the captcha answer wrong. I just left that blog and didn’t bother commenting again.

Fix it: If you’re using a captcha plugin, disable it! Akismet is quite good at eradicating comment spam, and in recent WordPress versions, it’s installed by default.

akismet

Another good antispam plugin is G.A.S.P. (short for Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin), which presents a checkbox below the comment form, to check before submitting a comment. Since bots can't check it, they can’t comment.

Mistake #3. No Option to Subscribe to Comment Replies

Many blogs have a ”Subscribe” checkbox below the comment form, letting readers subscribe to any new comments the post gets. Some even include another checkbox to subscribe to new blog posts.

But hardly any have an option to subscribe to just replies to your comments. Readers may not want to subscribe to all the comments, but they’ll want to know when you’ve replied to them.

Fix it: Use a WordPress plugin like the Send email only on Reply to My Comment. There’s another such plugin from Intense Debate, which has similar options like the above.

comment-email-notifications

Mistake #4. Not Moderating Comments

This is more of a problem for new bloggers, but even some expert bloggers fail to moderate their blog comments. [Ali's note: Some DBT readers will know I could be better at this...!]

If you don’t check the moderation queue regularly, it’s frustrating for readers who’ve tried again and again to leave a comment.

Fix it: Check and moderate your blog comments on a regular basis and don’t forget to check the spam folder occasionally. Sometimes, legit comments will land up in there.

Mistake #5. Enabling Links within Comments

By default, WordPress is set to allow one link per comment. But, spammers take advantage of this and use it for building backlinks.

Usually, there’s no need for commenters to post links in their comments. If it’s really important, they can e-mail the blog owner with the relevant links.

Fix it: Check under WordPress Settings -> Discussions, to make sure links in comments are disabled. Set WordPress to hold the comment if it contains 1 or more links (see the screenshot below).

If they are legit comments, you can periodically check your spam folder and approve them (edit them to remove the link first, if you want).

Have you noticed any other comment form mistakes, you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments below.

Raspal is a Freelance Writer and Blogger at RaspalWrites, where he has just published a follow-up post to this, 5 Additional Comment-Related Mistakes to Avoid. He enjoys helping people, is interested in technical content writing and blogging and available for hire. You can follow Raspal's personal and business ramblings at @raspalwrites.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

Five Crucial HTML Tags Every Blogger Should Know - DailyBlogTips

Five Crucial HTML Tags Every Blogger Should Know

Posted: 09 Jan 2014 07:00 AM PST

A couple of weeks ago, I explained the basics of HTML and why you might want to use it.

In today's post, I'll go through some simple HTML tags that every blogger should know about.

You can add extra information within some tags, too, as you'll see in the examples – for instance if you want position an image centrally, or make a link open up in a new tab.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to type these tags when creating posts in WordPress: you can use the buttons in the visual editor instead. (Or you can copy your post in from Word, with formatting already in place.)

<p>

The <p> tag indicates a paragraph. Each paragraph needs to start with <p> and end with </p> so that your browser knows where to put the line breaks.

(HTML code doesn't recognise spaces, except the space between two words.)

In WordPress, <p> tags are added automatically by your blog's code and don't appear in the Text editor. (You can also choose to add them automatically in widgets.)

If you go to a post on your blog and click "View source" in your browser, you'll see the <p> and </p> wrapped around each paragraph:

HTML-code-showing-paragraphs

<h1>, <h2>, <h3> … and more

HTML has special tags for headers and subheaders, which are:

<h1> — the biggest, "Heading 1"

<h2> — the next biggest (this is what I’m using for subheadings in this post)

… and so on down to <h6>

Normally, you won't use <h1> in your content as that's used for the title of your blog post or page.

To use a header tag, simply wrap it around your subheading like this:

<h2>Your Next Steps</h2>

<a href> – Creates a Link

The "a href" tag creates a hyperlink. If a link ever goes awry, it's useful to know what the code looks like so you can fix it.

Here’s a link and the code for it:

DailyBlogTips

<a href="http://www.dailyblogtips.com">DailyBlogTips</a>

You can add extra features to your link. For instance:

<a href="http://www.dailyblogtips.com" target="_blank"   title="This link opens in a new window/tab">DailyBlogTips</a>

This produces a link like this (hover your cursor over it to see the title):

DailyBlogTips

If your link doesn't work…

Check that you've used straight quotes not curly (smart) quotes.
Check that you haven't missed one of the quotation marks.
Check that the URL starts with http://

<img> – shows an image

The "img" tag shows an image, like this one (me and my daughter Kitty on Christmas Eve):

In its simplest form, as for the image above, it looks like this:

<img src="http://www.dailyblogtips.com/wp-content/uploads/  Xmas-Eve.jpg"/>

You can add extras to your image too, e.g. title text (which appears when the user hovers over the image). If you want to center an image in WordPress, use class=aligncenter.

<img src="http://www.dailyblogtips.com/wp-content/uploads/  Xmas-Eve.jpg" class="aligncenter" title="Ali and her daughter   Kitty on Christmas Eve"/>

Note: This tag is opened and closed in one. The forward slash at the very end of the tag closes it.

<ul>, <ol> and <li> – Creating Lists

Here's an "unordered list" in HTML:

<ul><li>Bread</li>

<li>Milk</li>

<li>Carrots</li>

<li>Potatoes</li></ul>

This displays as:

Bread
Milk
Carrots
Potatoes

Note how each list item has <li> at the start and </li> at the end, and the whole list has <ul> at the start and </ul> at the end.

To use numbers instead of bullet points, simply switch the <ul> and </ul> for <ol> and </ol>. You’ll get an "ordered list" like this:

Bread
Milk
Carrots
Potatoes

Do you have a sixth essential tag to add – or other HTML tips to share? Let us know in the comments.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

Pages

USAHA BERSAMA

Ads 468x60px