This strategy is basically a brain dump of thoughts I’m having about how to use “do follow” and comments to best serve your blog over time.  I’m thinking that different strategies will suit blogs depending where along the blog lifecycle the blog is.  

OK.. so your blog might be a brand new blog, a blog with some traffic, or a very established authority blog with lots of traffic. (baby, teenager, mature.)

If you have a baby blog, you will want to encourage comments as much as possible, to break the ice on your blog and get the ball rolling with your community.  Folks are more likely to stick around if they can see that comments are being made and that you are replying to them.. people like interactive blogs.  Yaro Starak suggests in his Blog Mastermind blueprint thinggy the possibility of you leaving comments on your own blog to get the ball rolling.. (just don’t get caught!)  There are, of course, other ways of getting blog comments at “Baby Blog” level. 

The one that immediately springs to mind for me is installing the “do follow” plugin and advertising your blog on the “do follow” directory, the bumpzee community etc.  At this stage in your blog’s evolution, any comments that are not obvious spam comments are good comments, beggars can’t be choosers, as they say, and advertising your blog this way should attract some commenters, even if just SEO marketers.

At this stage you will want all comments to be followed so install the regular semiologic plugin (if you are on wordpress).  Other plugins you might like to install the wordpress plugin that allows commenters to subscribe to your comments, so that they are emailed whenever a new comment is left on that post.  Subscribe to Comments is a product of Tempus Fugit.

There are other plugins for comments that are very popular, but these probably aren’t good to install now, for example, the plugin that puts the most recent comments in your sidebar and the plugin that puts the top commenters in your sidebar are going to look pretty pathetic, and basically advertise that your blog is loserville and not a popular place to hang out.. yet.  And you don’t want to draw attention to that.    So leave off on these until your blog is a little more popular.

Once your blog has reached teenager status, you can start to be a little pickier about your commenters and the comments that are made on your blog.    Don’t forget - this is YOUR blog, you are queen (or king) of all your survey, and you can just delete crappy comments willy-nilly as you may and whenever you feel like it, without feeling bad.  You have license to be a tyrant, so don’t belly-ache over each comment, just delete it if you don’t like the feel of it and move on.  You are a teenager, after all.

At this point you might consider installing the plugins that I recommended against when the blog was in baby status.  This includes the show top comentators plugin and the show recent comments plugins.  Once you have established a community that is centered on the blog itself, you may decide that you no longer need the spammy comments and no longer advertise the “do follow” status of your blog in the directory or bumpzee to cut down on the comment spam you receive,  and simply view the “do follow” status of your blog as a bonus for the regular “real” readers of your blog.

Once your blog grows up and reaches mature or authority status, you will be receiving many comments a day, and trolling through the moderation queue looking at all that spam could put you in a spin!  At this stage, don’t advertise the fact that your blog is “do follow” and if you really hate the spam, install a plugin like the link love plugin, which allows you to control how many comments a commenter needs to make before their links become “do follow” links.  If you explain this is a “comment policy” and remove anything that advertises your “do follow” status, you should be able to turn off the human comment spammers as they realize that there is nothing in it for them.

So, to sum up - by evolving your comment strategy over time to suit the lifecycle stage of your blog, you can use your comment policy to help your blog succeed and grow.