Bloggers: Are you 100% confident your readers are getting your responses to their comments?

This is a public service announcement to the blogging community.

Bloggers: Quality control your responses to comments! Your loyal readers are commenting and inputting their email addresses for a reason. They absolutely should be getting your responses returned to them via email!

I see so many bloggers who respond to comments (literally pages and pages of comments) and I swear I am not getting those responses back in my email. I’d say of all the bloggers I follow, that maybe 10% respond back to me via email. No commenting reader has time to go back to a blog post that they commented on, so that they can see your response.

I see all these comments. I know that bloggers are spending a lot of time to respond. Yet, I know for a fact that those responses are not getting seen. This happens so often that I honestly don’t have time to personally email 90% of the bloggers I follow to tell them, you need a maintenance check! My web designer triple-checked this for me, but in addition, I did it myself to ensure that this was the case.

You can too! Here’s how to do it.

• To ensure I was mimicking this process as a reader, I logged out of WordPress.
• Go to an old post. I randomly picked a post I wrote on 12/30/07.
• I put in my name, my work email address (versus my personal email address that’s attached to my WordPress account), and commented, “testing my own comments.”
• Then I logged back into WordPress and responded, “thanks for commenting.”
• I immediately received an email to my work address confirming that the process works.

Bloggers, can you please do this? PLEASE! Don’t rely on settings or confirmation from your web designer. Please please QA/QC your work!

Bonus, for any bloggers who still use Captcha, please turn it off. I’m considering instituting a policy of not commenting on blogs with Captcha, as I simply don’t have the time to play mind games!

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