Why most blogs should allow comments

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Over the past decade, I’ve seen more and more blogs get rid of their comment section and simply say something like “go discuss it on Facebook”. I think that’s a bad move, at least in most cases.

At a high level, it’s because I still think we need to take back our content. Taking back your posts is a great start, but things fall a bit short if you continue to let social media handle the ongoing discussion. While people will ideally be sharing your thoughts on social no matter what, you should encourage the primary conversation to happen on your site.

While this blog doesn’t see a lot of comments (a total of 879 of them over the years), all of them have added to the conversation and a few of them have been quite interesting. Two quick examples were Dennis Crowley chiming in on my post about Foursquare in 2009, and Peter Shankman offering me a correction and more details about his thoughts on the “go ahead, pick my brain” post from a few years back. If I had just offloaded those comments to social media, they’d be impossible to find at this point. Instead, they add great information to both of those posts, even years later.

When it comes to allowing comments on a blog, the conversation is a bit different depending on what kind of blog you run, and I think blogs can be sorted into three rough categories:

  1. Very popular or business blogs
  2. Semi-celebrity blogs
  3. Personal blogs

Very popular blogs

If you run a very popular blog, or one for your business, comments can be a tricky thing. A good example is a company like Anna Griffin, who see dozens of comments on every post, and often hundreds on a post (like this one). This requires someone dedicated to managing those comments and keeping the discussion on track. It’s hugely valuable, but it’s also a lot of work.

If you fall into this category, I can argue either side of this. I think you generally should allow comments and then work to keep the conversation solid, as it’s a tremendous way to build a community (like Anna Griffin has done), but it can be tough to keep things on track.

Semi-celebrity blogs

This is the group that I think struggles the most with comments. When I say “semi-celebrity”, I’m thinking of bloggers that are essentially going it alone, but have a big following. A good example is Chris Lema, a fantastic blogger with a huge following, and someone that doesn’t allow comments. He wrote in 2013 about why he had them, but wrote earlier this year about why he turned them off.

As much as I’m a fan of comments, I’d likely do the same thing if I was in his shoes. If I suddenly had dozens of comments on every post, I’d either need to devote significant time or money to address them. There is value in those comments, for sure, but probably not enough to justify the expense.

In his reasons for turning off comments, though, his third one is this:

The third reason is because the community went other places. As social media grew in dominance, and blogs started taking a smaller role in online conversations and community, I noticed that more discussions were happening on Twitter (at least for me) than on my own blog.

He’s not wrong, but I’m still going to try to fight that trend. Social media is continuing to slowly fragment, so it can be hard to find “the” conversation from a particular post. Chris is mostly on Twitter, the majority of folks are on Facebook, I tend to enjoy LinkedIn conversations, and then there is the whole new crop of networks always coming up. There is one place you could put a discussion where everyone can see it, and that’s at the bottom of the post. Again, though, folks like Chris are in a tough spot in the middle and I can understand why his comments are off.

Personal blog

This post isn’t about folks like Chris, though — it’s about the 99% of us that don’t have that “problem” of too many comments. If you have a blog (and you absolutely should), you should strongly consider having comments enabled. If you use a solid anti-spam tool like Akismet, the upkeep is very minimal. I want to give people a chance to share their responses on here, as their insights on my posts can make the posts better than my initial thoughts ever could.

For example, people had some good thoughts on cord-cutting options, questions about Roam Research, and tools for keeping up with contacts. None were super long discussions, but all help to add more context when people visit those posts in the future.

There’s no perfect answer for everyone, and there are some great reasons why you should disable comments on your site. For most of us, most of the time, leaving comments enabled will help make the web a bit of a better place.

What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know. 🙂

Principles versus policies

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

All businesses should have a core set of principles, and policies should follow after that. It’s easy to conflate the two, and it can be dangerous if you do.

I recently heard Adam Grant share the story of Robert Reffkin of Compass, and how this kind of overlap between principles and policies caused some problems there. Compass is a real estate brokerage, and Reffkin wanted to set it apart by not paying commission to his staff and just paying a flat salary. Some time down the road, Reffkin had to change the policy and lost a lot of employees because of it.

As Grant put it, Reffkin’s principle was to value his agents more highly than others and do it in a fair way, which was noble, but people only heard about the “no commission” policy and were upset when Reffkin “changed his principles”.

Treating clients right

After hearing it explained that way, I realized that this is something I flirt pretty close to the edge with and need to be careful of doing. At GreenMellen, one of our core values is to always do the right thing for our clients, even if it comes at a cost to us. That’s the principle.

The policies around that are things like not making our clients sign monthly contracts and not putting our link in the footer of client sites. I think it’s important to make that distinction between principles and policies, because those policies could potentially change over time.

For example, as we’re getting into Growth-Driven Design with our agency, having clients sign an annual contract might be required to help us make that situation work (where we lose money for the first few months, so we need the guaranteed revenue in later months to catch back up). For now we’re still structuring things in a way where a contract isn’t required, and I expect we’ll keep it that way, but I want to keep our options open. Even if we need to start requiring long-term contracts for some deals (the new policy), we can still always work inside of that to do what’s best for our clients (the existing principle).

Grant unpacked this a lot further in a recent interview with Guy Raz on the How I Built This podcast, which I strongly encourage you to listen to here.

Digital marketing doesn’t need to lead to digital sales

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

If you have an online store, some degree of digital marketing is essential to drive traffic and sales. On the other hand, don’t feel like digital marketing is futile if you don’t have way for visitors to transact business online. At the end of the day, marketing isn’t just about sales, but about conversions.

Not about sales?

I want to be clear that the end goal for most businesses is indeed to make a sale. If sales aren’t coming in, any business would be in big trouble. But sales aren’t usually the initial goal of digital marketing efforts, and in most cases a sale simply can’t happen as step one.

A great way to look at it is through the eyes of a marketing funnel, where you continue to add value to potential customers until (some of them) eventually make a purchase from you. This post has some great insight on how that comes together and things you can do to get your funnel in place.

In the case of the marketing services that we sell at GreenMellen, no one visits our site and immediately becomes a customer, nor should they. Our kind of work, as with most of yours, requires some time on both sides to find the right fit. In the meantime, we can keep working people down our funnel with email marketing, Meetup events, and other things to help us get to know one another.

Digital sales

If you have an ecommerce shop, your digital marketing is more likely to lead to digital sales, but depending on what you’re selling you still might need to take people down a path first.

Digital marketing is essential for almost every business, but set your expectations appropriately, and set up systems to help ensure that you’re able to make the most of every interaction that a visitor has with your brand.

The customer is always right in matters of taste

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The idea of “the customer is always right” goes back to the early 1900’s. Among others who coined the phrase was hotelier Cesar Ritz, who said “If a diner complains about a dish or the wine, immediately remove it and replace it, no questions asked.”

It’s not necessarily a bad policy, but can have a big downside when people realize they can take advantage of it. Or, perhaps they’re just going a bit nuts like when William Foster said it in the classic movie “Falling Down”:

The solution is to reframe the idea entirely by adding that little bit to the end — “…in matters of taste“.

In matters of taste

From a marketing perspective, the customer is never wrong. If you offer two colors of a product, your opinion on which color is better doesn’t matter much — the “better” color is the one that people purchase more frequently.

Or if you work in a hair salon and a client wants their hair cut in a way that seems odd to you, it doesn’t matter. They’re the ones paying, and their desire is what matters most.

Find the friction

The other way to look at “the customer is always right” is to take a minute before deciding if they’re actually wrong or not; they may just be misunderstanding the situation. Zendesk has a great analogy that goes like this:

Let’s run through a hypothetical example. Imagine a customer reaches out and says their web chat or bot is broken. A quick glance at their account and it’s clear that there’s a problem with the implementation. One approach is to tell the customer they’re wrong — the product is working fine, they just didn’t set it up properly.

But why? Maybe our documentation could be clearer. Maybe our onboarding emails or in-product messaging could be improved. Assuming the customer is always right is about assuming responsibility for our own customer experience.

The customer may not always be right, but it’s worth finding out what they think. Taking the time to really understand what your customers are looking for can not only help in your day-to-day business, but can be an advantage when trying to rank better in Google. A little empathy can go a long way, even if the customer isn’t really right every time.

The highest isn’t always the best

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Last year I shared some data that showed that a rating on Amazon of between 4.2-4.5 stars was generally considered more trustworthy than a product with full five-star reviews. Some bad reviews mixed in (ideally with reasonable responses from the owner) tend to make users trust the great reviews even more.

It reminded me today of a funny part of the show “The Good Place“, where Jason Mendoza shares his scale for rating dancers on a scale of 1-13, with 8 being the highest. Check it out here:

If you’ve watched the show, you know that taking any advice from Jason is likely a bad idea, but I thought this was a fun way to look at reviews.

Not unlike Jason’s idea, Amazon and Google reviews go on a scale from 1-5 with 4.5 being the highest. It’s weird, but generally holds true.

Why did that site show up in the search results?

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Google has historically been pretty quiet about what causes site to rank well in the search results. They’ll give high-level ideas (fast loading, great content, etc), but no specifics, and you can read many of my ideas from over the years in the SEO category on this blog. They’re still not opening up a bunch, they’ve just cracked the door for a little bit.

While they’ve not added it for every result, in many cases you can click and get some info about why Google brought up that result for you, and it looks something like this:

As explained by Search Engine Land:

Google Search can show the terms it matched on the web page and your query, including the terms that were related but not direct matches. Google also lists if links from other websites influenced the ranking, if the results had related images, if there were geographical reasons for the result ranking and more.

Search marketers always wanted to know why Google ranked a specific site for a given query. Well, Google is now giving you pretty detailed clues into why. Of course, this is not detailed ranking weights and signals, but it does tell you if the words match or match closely, if people link to the site, if there are geo-specific reasons and more.

It’s not going to make a huge difference for how people work to improve their search rankings, but any transparency from Google is a good thing.

Email isn’t dead yet

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Every few years we hear that “email is finally dead”. It’s not.

Social media, SEO, and digital ads can be great ways to help promote your business, but lowly email still generally has (by far) the best return on investment. According to a recent study from some top companies:

The study showed that email-marketing ROI is currently calculated to be 4,400%, or about $44 return on every dollar you spend in your marketing campaign.

There are two big reasons why email is still huge, and why it’s not likely to go away any time soon:

  1. Everyone has it. Some people check it more often than others, but no one can escape it. By comparison, your friends, colleagues and customers are spread around various social networks, with things fragmenting a bit more every day. In some ways I still wish that “everyone” was on Facebook, but they’re not and they’re not all going to come back.
  2. It’s an open protocol. If you don’t like Facebook and you leave for Parler, you can no longer talk to people on Facebook. If you don’t like Gmail and leave for ProtonMail, you can still email 100% of the people you could before. Yeah, changing your address is a bit of a pain, but you’re not cut off from anyone. The core tenets of email make sure that’s possible.

Email has challenges, for sure, but I don’t see either of those items changing anytime soon. This is why I’m bullish on services like TogetherLetters, which use email as their glue. I worry that those kinds of services may not take off quickly enough due to user laziness (“it’s just easier to create a Facebook group”), but as social media continues to slowly splinter into separate apps, email will likely remain the one place that you can reach everyone.

Episode Zero

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Over the past few years, it’s become popular for brand new podcasts to first publish an “Episode 0”, or something like “Introducing the xx podcast”. While introducing your podcast isn’t a bad idea, that’s not the real purpose of these initial episodes. Consistency is.

The way they were built, with the exception of some shows like Joe Rogan, podcasts use the open RSS format to share their episodes. This means any podcast player out there could find the feed for your show and offer it to their listeners, which is a great thing. However, given the huge number of podcasts out there, those players aren’t just randomly finding shows and adding them — you need to request to be added, and then you need to wait. Apple Podcasts is generally the biggest one to get into, as it powers many other apps, but it can take a few weeks to get accepted.

The other challenge is that places like Apple Podcasts won’t accept a show that doesn’t have any episodes. You need to publish at least one episode before you can apply to be added, and then you need to wait a few weeks for approval. As a result, it can be a messy few weeks trying to get approved by all of the major podcast apps (including others like Google Podcasts, Spotify, etc).

If you produce “Episode 1” at the beginning, you can’t really promote it for a while, as some of your potential audience might be able to download it, and others can’t. With “Episode 0”, you never really promote that episode. You publish it, start getting accepted to the various apps, and then you can hit the ground running with your real “Episode 1” a few weeks later.

It’s kind of an awkward way to do it, but it works well. If you’re planning to launch a podcast, I encourage you to create a super short intro episode, get it out into the world, and then focus your efforts on a proper promotion for your first true episode a few weeks later.

Too many internal links can be a problem

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

When adding content to your website, linking from one of your pages to another can be a great thing! As I’ve mentioned before (and a great example of an internal link), Google ranks individual pages, not full sites. Internal links help Google move around your site and get a better feel for the structure of everything.

Like most good things though, too much of that good thing can be a problem. Since Google uses those internal links to help understand the flow of your site, if every page on your site has hundreds of links to other pages on your site, it creates kind of a mess for Google to sort through and they can have a difficult time seeing the big picture.

As Google’s John Mueller recently said (via SEJ), when asked if too many internal links could be a problem:

I think, in the sense that we do use the internal links to better understand the structure of a page, and you can imagine the situation where if we’re trying to understand the structure of a website, with the different pages that are out there, if all pages are linked to all other pages on the website, where you essentially have like a complete internal linking across every single page, then there’s no real structure there.

I still encourage you to link liberally on your pages. If you can reference an old post or page that offers value to your reader, please link it! Your reader will appreciate it and Google will appreciate it.

However, if you think you’ve found a shortcut by putting dozens or hundreds of links on each page, you’re likely doing more harm than good.

Don’t lie to get the project

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Seth Godin recently published a blog post that ended with two great mottos:

  1. “You’ll pay a lot, but you’ll get more than you paid for.”
  2. “Our secret is that we don’t lie to get the project.”

I agree wholeheartedly with both of those, though the second one is a little tricky.

Back in 2016, a local politician wanted help rebuilding their website. We talked to her about what she needed, which was fairly substantial, and told her it would take 12 weeks to complete. She said that was far too long, and needed it done in six. I talked with the team some more about how we could speed things up, and the fastest we could do it (and still do a great job) was 10 weeks. The politician went elsewhere because the six-week timeline was non-negotiable.

I kept an eye on her site over the subsequent weeks and months, and the new site went live 23 weeks later…

The problem, of course, is that the other company lied to her (perhaps unintentionally, but lied nonetheless), but they still got the job.

The solution is largely a matter of time and trust. As you make connections and do work, if you can grow your reputation and expertise, people will learn to trust you over the unknowns. Over the last 12 years, we at GreenMellen have done a great job (I think) in providing great results to our clients, which leads to great referrals to others.

Unfortunately, if you have a brand new business there is no shortcut here. Start today to provide amazing service and support, and make sure the value you provide exceeds what your clients are paying. Over time, it’ll pay off in major ways.