That’s a very good point Amrit, and perhaps getting those with out blogs involved in the conversation may lead to them becoming bloggers themselves.

If your monetization strategy be based on the scale of unique visitors, inbound links and SEO are your best bet. Like an adsense publisher.

But if you benefit comes from something other than direct sales/response building a community certainly builds your “brand” (as/if it exists in the blogosphere).

That’s the question you need to ask yourself. If your comments become uncontrollable, I would say that they are not having much impact and will probably degrade the performance and impact of your site. I love reading comments and want to show visitors that I’m approachable.

Also, many of the readers that I have don’t have blogs, so trackbacks aren’t an option for them.

Regards,
Doug

I think we can leave that to visitors and keep the comment options live. I’ve observed people do what they want to do. If someone wants to write a blog post instead of leaving a comment he or she is anyway going to do that because bloggers are always looking for opportunities for creating blog posts. Comments enable even those visitors to express themselves who don’t maintain blogs. As you mentioned, they help generate a community, and consequently, loyal repeat visitors. This way you don’t have to rely too much on search engines and link-based rankings.

I’m speaking from a biased point of view, but comments are crucial for building site popularity. If you turn them off, readers will think you don’t care about them. Also, I’ve found that by conversing with readers through comments on both their blogs and my blog, I gradually built relationships with them, and in turn we naturally linked to each other when we found something interesting on each others’ blogs.

Very interesting article, thanks for the good read =)

PS: I’ve found that with Feedburner, the more subscribers I got, the less hits and comments I’ve received. It’s a fact of the ’1 million feed subscriptions’ Internet life, I guess

But IMO I think it ruins the community involvement with your blog. If you’re post is thought-invoking enough people are likely to blog about it as well as comment, whereas switching off comments altogether you run the risk of people neither commenting or blogging on your posts.