Any good content marketing campaign must focus heavily on creating high quality, engaging content for your company’s blog. By posting interesting articles targeted directly at your niche or market base you will have no issue attracting your desired audience. However, as with any marketing campaign, it is never a good idea to put all of your eggs into one basket.

While it is also important to focus your energies on activities such as link building and social media content, perhaps the most important (yet most often ignored) marketing outlets is in the comments section of your blog posts. Effectively managing the comments section of your blog posts will lead to a more active, engaged, and loyal audience. Though there are no hard and fast rules for how to manage your comments section, there are a few rules of thumb that you should try to follow, such as:

1) Actively Deal With Spam

Readers hate coming to a comments section on an interesting article and finding it littered with spam posts. These posts discourage intelligent conversation and devalue your blog post. It is important that you actively try to get rid of them as soon as possible. Though some of this work must be done manually, you should be able to use an anti-spam tool to remove most posts automatically.

2) Comment Regularly

Don’t leave all the commenting up to your audience. Join in the fun to show them that you are interested in conversing with them about the topic at hand. Taking the time to speak with your readers will leave them feeling appreciated and wanting to come back for more.

3) Get Personal And Keep The Conversation Moving

When responding to your readers in the comments section it is best to try to avoid overly general or boring responses. Speak from the heart, don’t be afraid to reach out on a personal level, and above all be sure to keep the conversation flowing. For example, on a blog post about the best music albums of the eighties, if a reader comments to let you know that they share your taste in music don’t simply respond by saying “Awesome!”. Instead, take the time to ask them some of their favorite bands or which shows they went to and enjoyed. When you can make a personal connection with a reader or customer they will be much more likely to want to deal with you again in the future.

Of course, utilizing the comments section does not have to stop on your own blog. It might also be a good idea to spend some time commenting on blog posts by your competitors or on forums that are popular in your industry. The possibilities truly are endless.