Virtually all Real Estate Blogs are open to the interactive masses via commenting, does yours' offer protection against what can hurt your business?

Let’s face it Realtors, professionalism is a requirement of your business and you shouldn’t lower those standards with your Blog. Sure, there are rewards out there for a transparent approach to marketing your services via a Blog. For starters, consumers that will appreciate openness in your approach as opposed to more common & less approachable methods. However, being approachable doesn’t mean you have to take chances.

Let’s look at some common reasons for having all comments automatically moderated:

* Missed Questions: questions may be posed on your blog and, if not noticed, you may miss the opportunity to connect with clients or prospective clients. If so, you risk disappointment and lost business. Comment moderation, for example, can notify you of all new comments via an RSS feed [or in some cases an automated email] so that you never miss an opportunity.

* Spam: if spammers manage to get their comments through, and you happen to miss a deletion, your site could become affiliated with porn, pharmaceutical resellers or other nefarious content. This can’t help you with prospective clients.

* Search Engine Mistrust: the wrong outbound links can get you in trouble and those left by spammers may point to sites the Search Engines don’t like. By affiliation, you can get you booted from their indexes.

* Vindictive Spam: if a vindictive person manages to get their comments through, and you happen to miss a deletion, you may have just opened yourself up to judgement by the public you didn’t deserve. Nobody can make everyone happy and there’s always two sides to a story, but why take the chance?

There are many that say the web should be completely open and that content & comments should be free, but we’d disagree when it comes to your business. Unmoderated commenting is ill- advised for a no. of reasons and hopefully the above begins to demonstrate why.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.