By now you probably know the importance of blogging or have heard rumors of this powerful marketing tool. What you may not have thought about is why it is important to be open and transparent with your blog.

One of the biggest mistakes I see bloggers make is not allowing readers to comment on your blog articles. In my mind this is a technique we call "SHUT UP and LISTEN!". Basically this is when a blogger or company is afraid that someone's comments might be "bad" or hurt their brand, so they do not allow readers to comment on their articles or they monitor the comments and decide which ones meet certain requirements.

Here is the problem from a marketing stand point. By not allowing people to share their ideas with you via an article comment, prospects and clients are unable in engage and interact with your brand. Yes this allows you to control your brand, but you lose all opportunities to engage with prospects or build stronger relationships with your customers.

I was reading a good article the other day on how to get and hire a professional logo designer. The article was very good except the writer was wrong on a few points (in my opinion). I wanted to share some ideas that might help the writer and any readers of this article have some other ideas or other ways of looking at things relating to logos. This would have opened up a conversation between me and this writer and would have offered a lot of value to his article because he was getting other people point of view on this topic.

So if you are a blog writer or thinking of starting a blog, do not turn off commenting on your blog. As a matter of fact don't even monitor the comments. Letting people post whatever they want will offer the comment poster more freedom, but it will also allow you to gain respect.

How do you deal with negative, ugly posts or spam? Well, these items are not always a bad thing. If someone posts things that are negative, reach out to these people and see if there is anything you can do to help them out by commenting this type of response to them. How you handle negative comments shows a lot about what it would be like to work with you and could help you get more business or credibility. When you have spam like comments you can decide if you want to keep them or remove them. Most blog software allows you to remove comments. I wouldn't remove them though unless they are truly spamy comments and not relevant to your topic at all.

You see by not allow blog comments you are saying "Shut Up and Listen!" to your readers. Does anyone really like talking to someone who will not get a word in edgewise? Not usually. This is a lecture note a conversation. So get out there and have a conversation with your readers and respond to their comments within the day and you will be amazed at the following you will create and the respect prospects and clients will give to you through your interaction with them and allowing them to express themselves. Oh, this is a great way to keep your fingers on the pulse of clients and prospects and learn what they are thinking. This is better than most surveys.

Happy blogging!