Of course, we want loyal readers and to make them loyal we have to put in certain efforts. We need to build a strong relationship with them. And the foundation of this relationship is their ‘Feedback’.

Every relationship needs special care and attention. We are supposed to spend some of our time to groom that relation. Be it the relation with our family, our friends or even our customers. We take this blog as our business organization. We make sure to plan each and everything, even the font sizes and the color schemes. MBT lab is our Manufacturing department. Blogger widgets, plug-ins and tools are our products. Daily posts on MBT are output of our Research Department. Advertisements on MBT are handled by our Sales and Promotion department .As in business we need to develop every department, same is the case with our blog or website. Our readers are our customers and like every big organization we feel it important to have a ‘Customer Care Center (spell check please).
If we spend hours and hours on writing a single post but failed to communicate with our readers… all our efforts would go in vain. No matter how technical our posts are, how beautiful our blog is. We may be able to gain a handful of readers but not a good traffic. This is because our readers need our response. They want themselves to be greeted by the blog owner. They want to present their reservations, they want to share their opinion, they want to remove their confusions, and they want their questions to be answered …. They want to communicate directly with the blog owner or the post author!
And we are required to answer them politely, humbly and timely. That’s enough to build a strong loyal readership.

Having said all this does not fulfill our duty. It’s now time to have a look at practical ways of managing this feedback. Our aim is to make the most of this feedback, to have a mutual benefit. We need to satisfy our customers, find out their needs, concerns and to make changes in our actions accordingly so as to get acceptances from them… eventually expanding our business.

To receive the feedback on every single post, there’s nothing better than having a comment section at the end of every post. You may avoid spam comments by restricting the comments to be posted by only those who have their id’s approved by ……….. You should keep the right to delete any comment to assure a clean and better environment of your blog. The post author should visit his/her post at least once in 24 hours, better it is twice, to reply to the comments. He/she should try to thank every reader by his/her name and addressing him/her individually. He/ she should pay special attention to criticism and must reply it gently.

Sometimes our readers do ask questions which are not related to the post. Of course, we can’t let them down and also we don’t want to start a new topic inside a topic. So to handle this situation, we may have an ‘Off-topic Question Section’, where all off-topic and general queries can be dealt. We may further categorize it by making separate sections for separate categories.

Since most of the readers do not find themselves comfortable in leaving a comment and they do not tell us even if they dislike the post. Their silence badly affects our business because they continue to dislike and we remain unaware of it. Instead of improving our quality and changing their dislike into like, we keep the same quality with a satisfaction that this is what our customers need. How to know about their opinion? Basically, such kind of readers think they don’t have enough time to comment on each and every post. They don’t want to get engage in signing in, writing a comment, submitting it etc. But, they would be ok if they are given a chance to tell their opinion by ‘one click’. This ‘one click’ option can be provided using star rating widget. Trust me, they will provide feedback, until and unless they are damn rude :p

If you have a blog with categories associated to different team of writers, you may have a different way of handling questions. What I would do in such a scenario is, I would mail any new query to all team members of that category with a widget displaying its status as ‘unanswered’. As soon as any of the members replies it, its status is changed to ’answered’, indicating that its turn to answer other queries. Now, how do we know if the reader is satisfied with the answer or not? Simple, we may design a widget indicating its status as satisfied or not. If the reader is not satisfied, its status is again changed to unanswered and the same mechanism repeats .i.e. a mail is sent to all members, to answer the question again with some better arguments. And all this mechanism in programmed, of course I personally would not be checking the status and forwarding queries.

But who would program such a widget for you? Adopt the traditional approach. Make it obligatory on all your team members to answer all queries on their posts periodically.

It is also not possible keep visiting same post again and again to answer comments. Since new posts are to be published and they need catering as well. It’s better to specify a time period that tells readers that the author does not visit the post after 3 days, for example. Or you can have a recent comment widget that keeps you inform about the recent comments be it on the latest post or the one published three months ago. You can then deal with them accordingly.

Above mentioned ways are just meant to provide you an idea. You can take an idea and modify it according to your blog’s subject. You can work on any of them and come up with something better. Do comment and tell us how you feel about this post. After all, we also need your feedback.
Cheers!