Conversations can be crucial to creating a valuable blog — without an active community of followers commenting on what you create, clinking on the links and ads you post and so on, it can be extremely difficult to create a sustainable and thriving blog.

But just because it is important to have readers interacting with your site doesn’t mean that you can afford to focus on that end of things to the exclusion of considering the content of what your community is adding to your site.

The Extreme Version of This Problem

I’ve worked as a blogger-for- hire for quite a while. As such, I’ve often had posting privileges on sites that don’t belong to me and that I am ultimately not responsible for. In some case a client may hand me a user name and a password and tell me to write about a general topic on a regular schedule from here on out.

I try very hard to stay close to the topics that clients give me, but more than once, I’ve had clients come back to me and want to at least tweak the type of posts I’m writing. That’s fine — their blogs, their rules. But when a client comes to me six months after having me start posting, without giving me any feedback in all that time, and says that none of my posts have worked and he wants to take them all down… well, that’s a very worrying situation to be in. The only thing you can assume, then and there, is that the client in question hasn’t taken a look at their own site in months.

That can mean a lot more than someone is less than pleased with the actual content on his site. It can mean that broken images have gone unchecked, no one has responded to comments and there could be spam all over your posts from automatic commenting software.

Maintaining Your Blog is More than Creating Content

It can be a simple question of what you want readers to see when they come to your site. Do you want there to be comments that show that you don’t get rid of spam, whether or not you interact with your readers? The only way to avoid that situation is to make sure that the content of your site (posts, comments and all) is as well maintained as your design and other elements.

There are other concerns that can tie into the issue, as well: while it’s fairly rare, it’s not out of the question that a reader could add a comment to your post that infringes on a third party’s copyright. That, in turn, could put you on the hook for dealing with a copyright infringement problem. It can be something relatively easy to resolve — just deleting the comment in question can make the problem go away — but you have to be paying close enough attention to do just that.

Pay close attention to what’s happening on your blog, especially if readers or other bloggers have any access at all.