MBA2267 Why Blog Comments Are Dead + Free Ride Friday

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Doll RMBA Show Business lessons you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today is Free Ride Friday where we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs and we're giving away our Automated webinar challenge, our 30 day course on how to build your automated system to get leads and sales on Autopilot. It retails for $499 over at webinarninja.comawc or you can win it for free. Just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review. Listen in on Friday just like today to see if you won. It's that easy. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode you will learn why blog comments are dead. If you run a website with a blog, I'm here to tell you make sure you have no comments under your posts. Blogging is incredibly powerful. It's a great SEO tool. You should have a blog. I know. I've been blogging for over 15 years and have benefited from blogging in so Many ways. But up until recently, in the last few years, it was common practice to have comments under your blog, to get people to comment on the post, share their feedback, ask questions, to engage. In theory, this sounded amazing, and it was amazing for a long period of time. But these days, it's bad news. It's a bad idea, and I'll explain why in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Blog commenting and comments under blog posts were the norm. It was the standard for years, and it was for good reason. It got people engaged. You learned a lot about the people that visited your website through their comments. They would come back to the website, would increase traffic, because they wanted to see what people thought about their comments. You had conversations and all was fine in the world. But like many things on the Internet, bad actors come in and ruin things for everybody. And listen, in theory, having a blog, it makes sense to have comments, right? But in recent years, the negatives are outweighing the positives of having comments. And that's why some of the biggest blogs in the world that had hundreds of thousands of comments under their blog posts are killing their comments section in their blogs. In preparation of this episode, I actually visited some of my favorite blogs I've been frequenting for years, my favorite resources online. I looked at the top blogs that I visit, and all 10 of them have removed commenting. And let me tell you why. And I've learned this with my own experience with my own blogs, but also speaking to other business owners. Number one, spam. Bad actors, hackers, spammers, whatever you want to call them, have become really sophisticated online these days and are creating sophisticated bots to spam people's websites. How sophisticated? They're going through verifications. These bots are going through Captcha and spamming your blog pages with malicious links, scams, horrible comments. It's just absolutely horrendous. And the vast majority of this is not targeted. It's actually quite weird. But there are people on the Internet that just want to see the world burn, and they're going to take down your site with it. Well, at least they'll take down the comments section. This is going to cause you to spend a lot of time in moderation, meaning you're not going to allow posts to get posted without you moderating it. And often you're just trying to fight spammers, hackers, and spending very little time engaging with your audience. Second, SEO. Now, many people thought commenting would help their SEO because keywords would be used by other people. But in fact it's hurting your SEO. Your search engine optimization part of your search engine optimization score or rank has a lot to do with your page speed, how fast your page loads and when you have comments, that comment section takes a while to load, reducing your load speed for your entire page, therefore affecting your SEO. The best blogs in the world are doing everything they can to speed up their website to make sure that the page speed is top notch. Unfortunately, commenting sections under blog posts really drag things down. Next, even if all the comments on your blog are legit, they're not spam, they're not hackers, you still have to moderate these comments and make sure that they are not nasty and that they're on brand with your business. This could be a lot of work, especially if you get all traffic to your blog. And essentially it's an activity that doesn't really generate revenue or help your bottom line. And a lot of people that I spoke to feel like it's just more trouble than it's worth. And it's because what I'm about to talk about, which is the evolution of social media, social media has now become basically the town square where people have these conversations they used to have on blogs. So people have replaced their comment section with follow me on social, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, even YouTube and they allow to have the conversations there. Ask me a question on Twitter, tell me what you think about this post on Facebook. Share it and give your two cents. And blog owners are directing traffic to their social pages to have these discussions and conversations with their audience. These tools are a lot easier to manage and to moderate, as well as to weed out bad actors and block hackers. Nowadays it's actually quite rare to see people have comments below their blog posts. And it's for good reason. People started to realize over the last few years that blogs and the content it provides is the best part of having a blog, not the actual discussions. These can be had in private communities, on social media, in Slack channels, things like that that are organized and meant for conversation. The best thing about blogging is the content. Marketing is getting people to come to your website through a Google search, finding the answers to their questions through your blog posts. So a lot of great blogs have shifted their energies to creating better content, more longer form content, and seeing their blog as a source of information, sort of like in depth guides. As little as five years ago, the average blog post was around 700 words. It's now more than doubled at an average of 1500 words. Business owners have realized that we can go really deep in these blog posts and make the reason why they come to the blog for the content and not the conversation. Now what a few very smart businesses have done that I'm actually considering doing at the $100 MBA is monetizing the engagement. What does this mean? Well, people might have questions at the end of a blog post. They might be like, hey, this is a great blog post. I want to apply the strategies and what you're teaching here to my own business or my own life. But I have a few questions. So on the bottom of the post, a lot of them are saying, hey, if you have questions, why don't you join our community? And this is a private community using a real community software. Whether it's asynchronous like Circle or Better Mode or Synchronous like Slack or Discord, they're inviting them to actually go to the community to ask questions freely, not only to you, but to everybody in the community. And some are putting a paywall in front of this community. And it's not a huge ticket item. It's like a one time fee to join the community or a very small monthly fee, something like $10 a month, $5 a month or a one time fee of $30. Now why do they do this? Well, they want to create some barrier of entry to get serious people in the door. High quality people. If you're a spammer and a hacker, you're not going to pull out your credit card and pay to get inside. This is why they were having a free for all in the comments section before, because it was so simple and easy and open to the public. So if someone's genuinely interested about getting better and joining a thriving community, $5 a month, pretty, pretty cheap and sort of a no brainer, this qualifies them and gets them through the door. This way you do have that engaging conversation with your audience. You do get a chance to learn from your potential customers. They can ask questions, you can give value and they'll actually take it more seriously and be more of a contributor to the community if they're paying. We value what we pay for. And I love this idea. Even if there isn't a paywall and they just go through the process of signing up to the community, whether it's a Facebook group or a Slack channel, like I said, still allows you to have some sort of qualification phase where you can ask some questions before you accept them.

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So in my opinion, the vast majority of blogs that are using blogs to content market to drive traffic to their site are shutting off their comments. And it's for good reason. Just like I mentioned in today's episode, there are a couple exceptions. If you're in the media, meaning you're like a news blog, whether that's sports news or politics or even celebrity news, commenting is still alive and well and the trade offs are worth it. This is why commenting is huge on YouTube. Because you're part of the media when you're publishing videos on YouTube. But if you're producing content to inform people, to teach people, to offer a resource of guidance, Just not worth it anymore. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Today's episode's not over though. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Shamina Taylor. Shamina says great listen. 5 stars. I was moved by Omar's solo episode. Must read Russell Brunson's Expert Secrets. Omar mentions that two people can be right in their own truths and there are multiple ways to reach the same destination in sales and in business. Your beliefs around business and success will ultimately determine your outcome. This is such an amazing podcast and I highly recommend it to anyone. Thanks Sharmina for that amazing review. Your mission is to email me over at omar@100mba.net to make sure that I hook you up with a lifetime membership to our Automated webinar challenge, our $500 course on how to automate your leads and sales with automated webinars. You want it. And if you want to win a free ride just like Shamina did. Just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like right now to see if you won. It's that easy. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Business, especially online business is constantly evolving. What was once in and trendy and useful and helpful can often change. And when something's not serving you anymore, there's no reason to continue to do it. Business is all about knowing how to use your resources, your time, your money, your effort, your talent, your team. Be mindful where your resources are going and always evaluate. Is it an even exchange? Is it worth me continuing to do the actions I do every day in my business to help my business grow? Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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