Did someone leave a negative comment on your business blog? Don’t fret. It happens to all bloggers - whether their blog is personal or for business. Negative comments are an unavoidable aspect of blogging. It can be stressful at times, but with these guidelines you’ll know what to do the next time you receive a negative comment.

Have a moderation system in place.  When you moderate incoming comments, you can control what gets published on your blog.  This eliminates the presence of spam and unnecessary negativity on your blog.

Don’t take it personally.
When you receive a negative comment on your business blog, don’t take it personally. After all, there could be many different reasons that motivated a reader to write a negative comment.  If they’re constructive, let the negative comments be a learning experience for your company. Having a positive attitude towards it can be a great help.

Take some time out and clear your mind.
Walk the dog, watch television, listen to music, do anything you want; just don’t reply on that negative comment yet. Clear your mind first. Anger can’t solve anything. Engaging someone in a debate, if done out of irrational emotions, might ruin your company’s reputation.

Analyze the comment.
What made the reader post the comment? Maybe you unintentionally wrote something that made the reader upset. Whatever it is, evaluate your blog entry. Understand what the comment is saying. Don’t disregard it; its point might be valid. The comment might be something that can help the company in the long run.

Ask questions.
If you want a more detailed explanation for a valid negative comment, you can contact the commenter via their personal email address (if they placed it on the comment form), or in public.  Knowing more about the complaint might help your company find the solution. Asking the right questions shows that you are sincere on trying to find the best way to work things out. By inquiring, you will learn about the problem from their point of view. You will also find out more about the problem this way.

Pay no attention to trolls.
Sometimes, a negative reader’s aim is to provoke you into a fight. They would post senseless negative comments that they can’t back up with logic. These comments should just be ignored, or better yet - deleted. But exercise proper caution when deleting comments. You might delete legitimate comments that can anger the one who posted it.

Off topic comments should not be ignored.
Occasionally clients need to air out their complaint but can’t find the right forum for it. Negative comments could be about another topic not related to the blog entry. Deal with the issue at hand.

Learn from the experience.
Read it, understand it and learn from it. Negative comments can be constructive. Your company could have made a mistake and overlooked it. Negative comments can tell you what went wrong. Be professional in dealing with them and response respectfully. And when the company is at fault, admit it. Nobody’s perfect. Be thankful to those who pointed out the errors. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, only bad losers.

Decision paralysis is something that should be avoided at all costs when it comes to business. This is the situation wherein a manager, or any person in a position, finds himself unable to make a decision at a crucial time. This can happen to anyone, anytime, at least once in his life. No one is totally exempt from such an occurrence - even the most competent of managers may find himself paralyzed when faced something of big import.

So what do you do when this happens in the business sense? Perhaps before this can be answered, it would be better to take a look into the reason behind the paralysis. More often than not, decision paralysis arises from the fact that something negative had occurred in the past - a decision gone bad.

The result is understandable, of course, but it is not an excuse to permanently stay in that crippled state. There are things that could be done for the better. Believe it or not, your business blog can help you out when it comes to making decisions and you feel that you are incapable of making them!

Think about it, what is your business blog for? Some reasons may be:

-to get the word out about your company and your products or services
-to communicate with your customers
-get feedback regarding your company and your products or services
-create a network
-others.

What do you need to make decisions? For every situation, there will always be something different but I do believe that one thing that your blog can help you with is information. You can go back to previous posts and comments and garner information that can be very helpful in making your decisions. More so, you can even gain some confidence when you see what you have written in your blog and what your readers have written as well.

In the last post, we talked about how important it is to befriend other bloggers. We talked about the importance of building your own social network of bloggers. For this post, let’s look at some details on how you can achieve this.

Communication
This is important in most any undertaking, but most especially when it comes to building your own social network. Bloggers always welcome comments. When you do get comments, however, do not just sit there and enjoy them. Make sure that you reply to these comments. You can do this in two ways – either e-mail or reply to the comment through the blog. You can even go one step further by writing a post on the comment. The important thing is that you make your readers know that you appreciate and value their comments.

Link, link, link
I am sure you browse other blogs a lot. If you stumble upon a blog that catches your interest and is, at the same, relevant to your own business blog, link! This will encourage to link to your blog as well.

List ‘em down
Actively look for blogs that are relevant to your own business blog. Do this on purpose – aimlessly surfing the Net is not the way to do it. Search for specific topics and then list down the blogs that you want to link up with. Make sure you visit them regularly and be active as well. Post comments, interact with the bloggers, and build relationships.

Who do you think your main readers are? If you answer is your customers, you just might be right. After all, that is your target, is it not? You want to reach out to your customers – both potential and existing – in order for them to know more about your company, your services or your products.

Yet have you thought about reaching out to a specific group – not in terms of whether or not they are customers or not? I am talking about the countless other bloggers – business, corporate, or otherwise.

The fact is that bloggers are one of the biggest groups that patronize other blogs. They know how it is like to maintain and promote a blog. They know what blogs contain and what their general goals are. As such, you should not isolate yourself from other bloggers.

In fact, it would be to the benefit of your blog – and thus your company – to establish relationships with other bloggers out there. This is what is called networking. You may call it what you like but the fact remains that your aim is to connect with other people who have other connections and so on.

This is what blogging is all about – getting the word out on your blog and getting the juice on other people’s blogs as well. If you do not communicate with them, then the chances are that your blog will die out – either slowly or quickly, but the end result is the same.

How do you make – and keep - other bloggers interested? Let’s look at these things in the next post.

Search engine optimization – we hear that phrase quite a lot these days. Maybe too much, actually. I have encountered countless business bloggers who believe that the primary reason they set up their blog is to increase their ranking when it comes to search engines. Their rationale is that a business blog (in addition to their web site) will increase their search engine ranking.

This is true – there is not doubt about it. Yet if you focus solely on SEO as your purpose for your business blog, you are surely missing out on so much more!

A business blog is meant for more than increasing your own web site’s search engine rankings. Do not overlook this fact or you are merely wasting your resources.

I have written many posts on the benefits of blogging for your business – all of them apart from SEO. Let me see, we have communicating with your readers, who by the way, are probably your customers as well. Then we have the idea of thought leadership – establishing yourself and your company as an authority in your field. Being able to gain this status is definitely a plus for your company. What else? You can carry out market research through your blog, getting information from your customers – both existing and potential.

I can think of so much more that business blogging has to offer. The point is, do not let yourself be sidetracked by merely one aspect of business blogging. You have the tool, you have the means – make the most out of it!