Let’s face it; it’s hard enough to get quality traffic to our blogs, the last thing we want to do is lose the opportunity to create a repeat visitor.

In the blogs I am asked to review, I often surprise the blog owners with questions they seem to feel are irrelevant, at least until I have improve their understanding of what makes blog visitors tick.

Most blog owners figure I am going to take a look at their themes, layouts, seo, plugins used, etc., and from there make recommendations on how they might improve the blog. The fact is I don’t even look at the blog until a dozen or so very important questions are answered.

One of the most important is “How do you respond to commenters, and how long does it take to approve and respond to their comments?”

To my surprise, at least when I was just getting into helping others optimize their blog performance from a revenue perspective, is how many bloggers either;

  • approved comments daily and never responded to the commenter directly (I am often told they are too busy to respond to commenters, again, amazing to me); or
  • they don’t moderate comments at all – a really big and dangerous no-no;
  • approved comments and responded with a canned response like “thank you for your comment, we will get back to you as soon as possible” and then never actually get back to them (how would this make you feel as a commenter?); or
  • responded to comments more or less sporadically, when they have the time, or when they happen to drop by the blog. (A really big problem with corporate type blogs where there often seems to be some confusion as to whom is responsible for responding to comments on the blog)

Now, we cannot and will not get into the business of isolating or selecting the right person to look after the corporate blog here, but want I do want to look at is a tool that can do a number of things for your blog comments including;

  • let you know when there is a new comment without using email or actually visiting the blog; plus
  • allow more professional and immediate responses to posted comments;

This little gizmo is called (take a big breath..)  “WordPress Comment Moderation Notifier” by the good folks at “HowToGeek.com”

It consists of two parts that work together;

  1. a standard WordPress “plugin” that is uploaded to your blog’s /wp-content/plugins directory; and
  2. a desktop application that sits in your PC or notebook tray area.

The plug portion has no configuration required other than to upload it and “activate” it as you would any WP plugin. The little desktop application is easily configured by telling a few things including:

  1. the web address of your blog;
  2. your admin username and password for the blog; and
  3. how often you would like it to check your blog for new comments.

In other words, it is very easy to set up.

Now, to use it you do…nothing. As long as you have the app running in your tray, it will do all the work. When it checks your blog (this all happens in the background and is invisible other than the little WordPress logo icon in your tray) and finds no nw comments, nothing happens.

But, when it checks your blog and finds that there is a new comment, the little WP logo in the tray changes to a red notification icon, and a little box slides up from the bottom of your screen telling you there is a new comment.

Simply click on the link in the little box, and you are taken directly to the comment to approve, deletes, spam, or otherwise moderate it.

Too easy right?

I am going to do a little video for this shortly but it is incredibly easy to use.

Get the WordPress Comment Moderation Notifier for your blog, and start doing a better job of managing comments, and responding to your commenters.

They will reward you by coming to your site more often, if for no other reason that  because you are more responsive to them than your competitors :>)

wordpress comment desktop app ron signature

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