Configuring Your Wordpress Blog Comments

[Text on Screen] Inside the Internet Marketing Mind. www.MatthewBredel.com. Hey, everyone, this is Matt Bredel from MatthewBredel.com. And a question that's come up to me in the last couple of days; it's actually come up three different times where people were saying, "Hey, Matt, I just set up a Wordpress blog but for some reason my users can't go and leave comments on my posts. How do I change this, or how do I fix this?" It really is an easy fix here. Just, if you don't know where to look, it's really kind of tough to do, but right now I'm in my Wordpress blog and I'm in my dashboard and what we're going to do is very simple. We're going to just go down to the Settings here and we're going to choose Discussion. And the place that this information is usually stored, which is by default is set, is this box right here where it says, "Users must be registered and logged in to comment." By default, most installations of Wordpress will keep that checked. And that means that a person that wanted to leave a comment would have to be a registered user of your Web site. And the majority of people who have Wordpress blogs do not require user registration to leave comments. So what you usually want to do is you want to uncheck this box right here, and that's gonna open the doors so that almost anybody that can come in can leave a comment. But, saying that, I do recommend, though, the one above this, where it says, "Comment author must fill out name and email address," I think that's pretty good practice to keep that one checked. So, if they're going to leave a comment on your blog they need to go in, they're gonna need to put in their first name and an email address, and just by doing that alone, they will be able to leave a comment. Now, the other question here is that once that comment is submitted, what are you going to do with it? Do you want to allow that post to go directly to a comment, or do you want to go through and manually approve it? That is what this section is down here, where it says, "Before a comment appears either an administrator must approve it or the comment author must previously approve the comment." Again, this is going to be up to your discretion, and I'm going to have another video where we're going to talk a little bit about comment moderation and spam. But when you're first starting off I'm going to suggest that you probably just leave it going and just leave it open for whoever wants to do it so it appears as soon as possible so that that person feels that you are engaging with them. Because if they post a comment and you don't get back to them quickly, they're more than likely not to leave another comment in the near future. And then the other thing here, too, is just about mailing you just so that if you are engaged in the whole commenting process. I would suggest that you either, at the beginning at least, anybody that posts a comment, have it send you an email so that you can go and respond to that comment very, very quickly. The other thing up here is that, be sure to set the "Allow people to post comments on your article." This button also appears on every single post that you make. But you might as well just set it as a default so you don't forget to make sure that posts are going to be allowed on every single one of your articles. So, again, keep this box clicked right here: "Comment author must fill out name and email." Keep that checked. And then down here, where it says, "Users must be registered and logged in to comment," I would typically leave this unchecked. And if you do that, and again, this is everyone's stumbling block, I think you'll have no problems with getting people to start commenting on your blogs. I hope this helps. See ya. [Text on Screen] Inside the Internet Marketing Mind. www.MatthewBredel.com.