Letting visitors comment on your blog articles is a great way to boost engagement. Whether you call it a Blog; News; Tips & Tricks; Important Information; or something else, regularly sharing custom content helps you educate, inform, show off your expertise, build credibility, and attract your ideal prospective clients.

Today, let’s talk about the pros and cons of allowing comments on your blog. But first, here are some topics you might consider when producing blog content for your business’ website:

Blog Topic Ideas

• Your Business: Share updates, achievements, and behind-the-scenes insights including key new hires, changes in services, participation at industry trade shows (don’t forget to take pictures of your team, your booth, and interactions with guests!).
• Client Pain Points: Address common challenges your ideal clients face.
• Case Studies: Showcase problems solved for other clients, highlighting your expertise and success stories.
• Industry Trends: Discuss recent developments and trends in your industry to keep your audience informed.
• Tips & Tricks: Provide valuable advice and actionable tips that your audience can apply.
• Recent Press Coverage: Share and comment on any media coverage or accolades your business has received.
• FAQs: Do you find yourself answering the same questions over and over again? Maybe it’s about your fees or the services you offer (or don’t offer!). Consider an FAQs section to provide clarity to your audience and help save yourself some time.
• Educational Content: Offer in-depth articles that educate your audience on topics relevant to your field.
• Guest Posts: Feature articles from industry experts or clients to add variety and different perspectives.

Allowing comments lets visitors engage with your business directly through your content.

Pros of Allowing Comments

Boosts Engagement: Comments create a platform for interaction, making your content more dynamic and engaging. Visitors can ask questions, provide feedback, and share their thoughts.

Showcases Expertise: Responding to comments lets you show off your knowledge. Thoughtful replies can reinforce your position as an authority in your field.

Builds Community: Comments can foster a sense of community among your readers, encouraging repeat visits and loyalty.

SEO Benefits: User-generated content in the form of comments can improve your SEO by adding relevant keywords and fresh content to your pages.

Direct Feedback: Comments give you direct feedback from your audience, offering insights into what your clients and prospects find valuable or challenging.

Cons of Allowing Comments

Time-Consuming: Moderating and responding to comments can take up a lot of time, requiring a dedicated team member to manage them well.

Spam and Trolls: Without proper moderation, your site can get flooded with spam comments or negative, unconstructive feedback from trolls.

Revealing Too Much Expertise: While demonstrating your expertise is great, there’s a fine line between sharing your knowledge and giving away too much for free. You have to balance helpfulness with discretion.

Potential for Negative Feedback: Public comments can sometimes include negative feedback or criticism. Handling these professionally and constructively is crucial but can be challenging.

A Special Note for Lawyers

The American Bar Association in their Formal Opinion 10-457 on Lawyer Websites says lawyers…”must carefully manage inquiries invited through the website. Websites that invite inquiries may create a prospective client-lawyer relationship under Rule 1.18. Lawyers who respond to website-initiated inquiries about legal services should consider the possibility that Rule 1.18 may apply.”

Your local state bar rules may differ, but I know that New York and Connecticut State Bars support this. You can help avoid confusion with your website visitors by including, along with your comment replies, a disclaimer that says something like, ‘the information in these comments is not intended to be legal advise, nor does it create an attorney-client relationship’. (BTW, you should also attach a similar disclaimer to any fill-in Contact Us forms on your site.) Here’s my disclaimer: please research this matter to ensure whatever you decide to publish on your website complies with your local laws.

Best Practices for Managing Comments

Setting up comments in WordPress is easy, but managing them well takes some effort.

Let’s start with the easier part first: WordPress lets you moderate comments (recommended) or allow them to be posted without moderation. You can set up email alerts to notify a designated team member of incoming comments. Spam software can handle typical unwanted posts, saving your team time and effort.

Now the harder part: It’s important not to allow comments and then ignore them. Empower your designated person to review, approve, and respond thoughtfully to comments as appropriate. Map out a path of escalation for your team member should they get stuck.

If engaging with site visitors is part of your lead generation strategy, you have to take action and do so quickly if you want to increase engagement. While general answers and feedback are readily available online, your business’s expertise is what people seek when looking for your particular services.

Conclusion

Turn on comments on your blog if you want to foster engagement and interact with site visitors who seek confirmation of your business’s credibility and expertise. If you can’t engage promptly, it’s better not to enable comments at all. By carefully considering the pros and cons and implementing best practices, you can leverage comments to enhance your content and build stronger relationships with your audience.

It may be tempting, then, with some tools, to use them until they give out. But in business and technology, holding onto yesterday’s tools can hold you back. The reality is, not moving forward means that you might be actually falling behind.

This became clear to me late last year when my iMac’s loud whirring noise during Zoom calls became too much to ignore. It was a definite sign I needed an upgrade. After diving into research, I opted for a MacBook Pro M3 Pro and a 27” Apple Studio Display.

This switch means I’m keeping up with the latest tech not only for its own sake, but also making sure that my equipment will keep up with my professional growth and meet the changing needs of my website design business. My new setup is high speed, max performance and looks super slick. Ah, I’m in love with my work tools once again.

A Mirror to Boutique Professional Services

I bet many boutique professional services firms can relate to this ‘tech-upgrade’ story, especially concerning their online presence. It’s not just about tech for the sake of tech; it’s about making sure your main client engagement tool—your website—is serving the way you need it to.

Just like how my reliable iMac started showing its age, your website might not reflect the level of professionalism you offer. Maybe the design feels old, the content doesn’t match your current business, or it just doesn’t work as well as it should. These little signs are big indicators that an update is needed.

Sometimes, just a few small changes can take you a long way. Especially if your website was launched within the past three to five years. But sometimes there are situations when a full redesign is needed.

This is especially true if your WordPress theme is no longer support by its developer. An unsupported theme means your site is at heightened risk for security problems or malware. Outdated or unsupported themes and plugins can also make your site slow and hard to use, turning site visitors—your prospective clients / referral partners / investors, etc—away.

A redesign can fix problems like how your site is organized and how easy it is to navigate from one page to another. Going beyond quick fixes, a redesign ensures your site is modern and stylish, solid, safe, and user-friendly, and aligned with your business goals.

A full redesign also lets you use the newest web tech, making sure your site works well on mobile, is easy to use, and has a better chance of showing up in search engines. This is key for being seen and making a good impression on the web.

Proactive Steps for Your Digital Presence

Waiting until your website is a problem can cost you more than business—it can hurt your brand. Just like I needed to upgrade my tools before they became a bigger issue, your website needs regular attention to work well with your ongoing business plans.

To keep your website part of your ongoing business plans, try these steps:

• Conduct Regular Audits: Each year, check how your website’s doing in terms of performance (site speed), user experience, and where it could get better. It’s not always easy to ‘see’ our own website. So finding a trusted, busy-savvy colleague who understands websites and your business can be a big help.
• Stay Informed: Keep up with the latest in web design. This helps your site stay relevant and competitive.
• Allocate Resources: Think of website updates (recommended monthly) and redesigns (to consider every 5+ years) as necessary investments in your business’s infrastructure, just like any other important tool.

Take the Next Step

If this conversation has you thinking about your website’s current state, it might be time to dive deeper. I offer a free mini website assessment to see where your site stands and how it may better serve your business. This no-pressure review is all about giving you useful insights and a few ideas for what you can do next.

Conclusion

Know When It’s Time to Elevate Your Online Presence. Don’t let an outdated website hold back the amazing services you offer. Get in touch to set up your free assessment, and let’s start making your website as dynamic and hardworking as your business.

Here are some very basic website promotion tactics for B2B professional service businesses that are relatively easy to implement but easily overlooked.

Email Signature

Like a mini billboard for your business, your email signature gives everyone you correspond with by email easy access to your most important contact information including website address. I don’t know about you, but I more often check someone’s email signature for current details about their contact information than I do my contact list.

Two options for creating your email signature:

• The basic option—your current email application. Whether you use Gmail, Outlook or Mac Mail , you can set up a plain text email signature directly in your email application. You’ll have somewhat limited design and layout flexibility. But don’t get hung up on the visuals. Plain text and judicious use of text formatting can be more than enough to capture your recipient’s attention. This is a good option for pretty much everyone, especially if you have little information to include in your email signature.
• The premium option—an email signature template. Using a service like WiseStamp will give your email signature a more designed look. It’s a popular cloud-based service that, because it’s cloud-based and serves your email signature outside of the limitations of your email application, gives you the flexibility to include graphic elements that are difficult to style and control in regular email. This means visuals like your headshot and logo, a full lineup of clickable social media icons, and even banner ads and animations are fair game.

  Because WiseStamp has done a great job of designing email signature layouts, this is a great option for anyone who absolutely must include more content in their email signature or just craves a more polished look.

  WiseStamp offers a free version and a Pro version. The free version has two different layout choices but includes their branding. For less than $6/mo, the Pro version offers ten layout choices and allows you to remove their branding.

Whichever route you decide to take, here are some ideas and tips on what you can include in your email signature.

Email Signature Tips

According to WiseStamp, a good email signature includes these five elements:

1. Your full name
2. Business name
3. Job title
4. Business phone
5. Website address

To add extra marketing punch, you can also include one or more of these additional elements:

• your tagline
• value proposition
• social media links
• a recently won award
• link to a recent project
• a call-to-action
• a bit of visual branding

Be careful though. You don’t want add too many details and risk confusing people.

For example, include just one email address and one phone number. Don’t make people figure out what the best way is to reach you. Keep it super simple.

Ultimately, how you set up your signature has to make sense for your business and industry.

What elements will you include?

Business Card

Even though, lately, a lot of our interactions are happening virtually, it’s still a good idea to have a tangible, high-quality business card. Face-to-face meetings and conferences are coming back.

Having a clean, high-quality, well-designed business card increases credibility and trust because it shows you’ve taken the time and effort to present yourself and your business professionally to prospective clients and partners. That gesture alone speaks volumes about your brand.

Some tips for what to include on your professional services business card:

• Full name
• Business name
• Phone number
• Business email address
• Website address
• Your logo
• Your business address

Consider including one extra promotional element on your business card like a tagline or a CTA (call-to-action). For example, your CTA could offer an extra bonus when initial complimentary consultations are booked directly on your website. Just be careful here. Freebies in certain professional industries—like law, for example—can cause prospects to perceive your firm as one that competes on price. And that may not be the primary position you want to take. In any case, you want to keep any extra details short and simple.

Small and large teams alike should use the same business card template design across the company.

If you have branded fonts already, great. If not, choose a font that complements your visual brand.

Get your new cards printed professionally on a beautiful, heavy-weight card stock. My favorite business card printer and paper: Moo Super Business Cards in Soft Touch. Like fonts and colors, paper quality is part of your brand. So choose accordingly.

vCard

In my opinion, a very under-utilized piece of marketing collateral is the humble vCard—an electronic business card that, while uncommon among the general population, is still popular among some professional service businesses, especially law firms. Popular address book applications including Mac Contacts, Google Contacts and Outlook Contacts allow you to import and export .vcf files or vCards.

Export your own contact information to share with others. And import their vCard into your address book, automatically populating fields with whatever basic contact information is included in the file. Because vCards limit the content that can be included in them, the guidelines for creating a vCard are basically the same as the ones for creating your email signature in your email application. As always, keep it simple.

VoiceMail Greeting or LinkedIn Audio

An often overlooked promotional opportunity, your recorded voicemail message gives callers the chance to learn a little bit more about your business while they’re waiting to leave you a message. Share the news that you’ve recently relaunched your website and share your website address. Encourage callers to visit the site if they haven’t recently. If your website address doesn’t translate well without a visual, spell it out.

• As part of your voicemail greeting or LinkedIn audio branding, invite callers to visit your new website for more information about your business. Write some notes for yourself on what you want to say in your voicemail. Then practice it a few times before hitting the record button.
• Make sure your environment is quiet.
• Speak clearly and enunciate! We are so used to hearing our own names that many of us speed through saying them. The same goes for our business names. You want people to hear you clearly to help them remember who you are.
• Keep your recorded message short and simple—you don’t want to discourage anyone from leaving a message because they got frustrated waiting for your message to end. LinkedIn gives you 10 seconds to record your announcement. Try to keep your voicemail greeting similarly brief. Consider cuing callers at the beginning of your voicemail recording how to bypass your message if it’s a bit longer.

Letterhead

Like everything else in marketing, letterhead tends to be digital these days. Even so, be sure to add your website address to your letterhead whether it’s printed or electronic. Google Docs, Mac Pages and MS Word all allow you to setup your letterhead using either or both the footer and header of the document so it repeats on each page.

If you choose to design a graphic of your letterhead that you upload to a word processing app, make sure all of the type is legible after you upload it. Also print out a copy to see how it looks on paper.

Conclusion

While many if not all of these ideas may seem obvious, you might be surprised how often these easy website promotion ideas get overlooked.

In Part 2, we’ll look at the next level of traffic-driving website promotion tactics.

Instead of seeing the usual Home, About, Services, and Contact page links, there was a new, mysterious link for crypto where the services page link used to be. And in place of the Services page was a cryptocurrency marketplace page.

This was alarming to the financial services consultant because attracting new clients to her business relies so much on trust. Even with her impressive credentials and an impeccable track record, her website was making a different impression about her business. An impression that would likely scare away good prospective clients.

So, what’s a professional services business to do to protect your website from malware infection? I recommend performing website maintenance every month. If you follow these steps, you’ll significantly reduce your website’s exposure to getting hacked.

Make Website Backups

Before making any changes to your website, make a full backup. This way, if something goes wrong during your maintenance session, you’ll have a full copy of your website that you can restore. My favorite tool for making backups is All-in-One WP Migration. It’s easy to use and creates fully restorable site backups.

You also want to make a full site backup after you’ve completed your maintenance session so you have a copy of the fully updated version of your website.

Another situation that calls for creating a website backup is after making extensive edits to your site. And, by extensive, I mean any amount of edits that you wouldn’t want to have to recreate if something were to go wrong.

Install a Security Plugin

Keeping your website safe and secure is easier when it’s monitored 24/7 automatically. One popular security plugin and my favorite is Wordfence. It is easily programmed to email you alerts whenever your website software becomes outdated or if there are any widespread WordPress issues that could potentially affect your website.

It’ll also send you reports showing if anyone’s tried to log into your site, and if there’s unusual activity from a particular country or IP address.

Update Plugins

Speaking of plugins, like Wordfence, there are many different plugins you can install on your website to allow for added functionality. You want to keep the number of plugins on your site to a minimum to reduce unnecessary security exposure. And make sure to update plugins when new versions are released.

I like to keep a record of plugin versions as I update them so if anything goes wrong—either during maintenance or shortly after my maintenance session—I’ll know what the last version is that worked and can revert back to it if I have to during troubleshooting.

Update WordPress

WordPress issues updates several times a year in response to security issues and also to enhance functionality of the core software. While it’s probably okay to allow minor updates to happen automatically, major updates come with a greater risk of breaking your site. So I recommend making major WordPress updates manually so you can do a careful inspection of your website during your maintenance session and make corrections on the spot.

Update Themes

Many websites are built using a WordPress theme with varying degrees of customization. If you’re running a small professional service firm, chances are, your website was built using a theme. Like WordPress and plugins, theme developers (the good ones, anyway) are constantly updating their applications with improved functionality and better security.

Whenever you do site maintenance you want to check for theme updates and make them when they’re available. Also, keep track of version numbers so you can revert back if something goes wrong.

Keep Your Website Secure with SSL

Does your website’s URL start with https? If yes, then it has an active SSL certificate in place. If your website URL doesn’t have the ‘s’, it indicates that there isn’t a valid SSL certificate.

While SSL certificates are ubiquitous these days, I still occasionally come across websites that don’t have one. The way I can tell? Besides the missing ‘s’ most major browsers—Chrome, Safari, Firefox—flag websites as non-secure when they don’t have an active SSL certificate.

As a professional service business, you don’t want your website flagged as non-secure, especially if you’re collecting visitor contact information or processing any kind of payments. Put yourself in your prospective clients’ shoes and ask yourself, If you were looking for legal advice or seeking financing or marketing consulting, how would you feel about hiring a firm with a website that’s been flagged ‘non-secure’? Would you trust that firm to help solve your issue? How about your ideal client? Would they shrug and call you anyway? Or keep looking for another professional service provider with an unquestionable website?

Conclusion

Having a website to promote your professional service business is a must. And like anything else on the internet, there are security risks. Malware bots are programmed to look for easy ways to breach websites. This means websites running outdated software—plugins, themes, WordPress—or that don’t have a current SSL certificate are all at risk.

You can largely avoid a malware infection by keeping your website updated with regularly scheduled maintenance. This not only keeps your website secure but has the added benefit of improving site functionality and can help sustain the intended look and design of your website.

But if taking the steps to keep your website up-to-date seems like more than you or your team are interested in handling yourselves, get in touch to find out about my Web Concierge Aftercare service. I can take this tedious but important security task off your plate while you keep your focus on your genius work.

The truth is, we don’t always have time to write a thoughtful article (guilty here).

So another tactic that’s easier, faster and a good complement to article writing is to leave comments on other websites—specifically, on industry blogs.

How to Leave Comments on Industry Blogs—The Step by Step

• Find relevant industry blogs where your ideal clients, potential investors, and/or strategic partners go for information.
• Choose a topically relevant recent article where you feel you can add value.
• Write a brief comment or pose a question that shows your expertise (but don’t blatantly promote your business or your comment might get flagged as spam).
• Use your full name in the name field (and don’t try to SEO optimize here because it could also get your comment flagged).
• Use a real email address in the email field and make sure that email is connected to a Gravatar.
• Use your full URL (including the https://) so your name links back to your website. For firms that have individual bio webpages, you can link directly to yours or another relevant webpage instead of the homepage (if it makes sense).

Benefits of Leaving Comments on Industry Blogs

• It’s easier and faster than producing your own content.
• It opens up opportunities to engage with other thought leaders in your industry who you may not have had the chance to engage with otherwise.
• It can help drive new traffic to your website.
• It can help increase brand awareness.

Sources: Neil Patel’s ‘8 Blog Commenting Mistakes You Need to Avoid at All Costs‘; Leanne Wong’s ‘Blog Comments and SEO: Backlink Benefits & What to Avoid (2022)‘

Conclusion

If you want to attract more quality traffic to your website, you have to make the time and effort to regularly produce quality content for your website. Because nothing is better for your SEO.

This means blocking time off on your busy schedule to produce informational articles, engaging videos or whatever your ideal clients want to interact with most when it comes to businesses like yours.

Another tactic that can help drive traffic to your website is to leave comments on blogs that align with your business niche. While it’s not as effective as publishing content on your own website, it’s easier and quicker, and can fill in the gaps when you’re super busy.

If you’d like to discuss basic SEO for your business website, let me know!

With that in mind, I recommend you work with a professional photographer. Choose one who has experience shooting landscape architecture and also knows how to create compositions for modern websites.

When your professional creative skills include photography, there’s no reason why you can’t take many of your website photos yourself. You’re at your client sites and have the opportunity to do so, after all. And with these tips, you’ll be better prepared to capture your amazing work beautifully.

Photo Layouts for Modern Websites

First, understand that modern websites use a variety of layouts and compositions to create visual interest. Three of those layouts include:

• Hero Shots like you might see at the top of a homepage. These photos often take up the full screen when you land on a website. Of course this is a very important photo…maybe the most important on your website. But try not to worry about it. That’s way too much pressure. Just make sure you have an ample amount of photos that we can choose from to create your website.
• Wide Shots that you might see at the top of secondary website pages or as part of a portfolio.
• Run of Site Shots that might appear within the body of webpages at 3/4 the width of the page and smaller. These might also be used in a portfolio.

How To Take Photos for Your Website

Next, some photo tips that apply specifically to website photography.

Hero Shots and Other Wide Shots

• Shoot with a DSLR for the best quality images.
• Use a wide lens to capture as much of the landscape as possible.
• Use a tripod to keep the camera steady for the sharpest quality photos.
• Take all hero shots in landscape.
• After you take the shots you want, take a few steps back to stand farther away from the subject than you might think, and take some more. Modern website design uses full-width layouts which means using photos that are much wider than they are tall.
  Having extra space on the top and bottom of your photos gives us the flexibility to crop them to make the photos appear even wider.
• Also take closeups to capture details of plants, built items and decorations.

Run of Site Shots

• Take a variety of landscape and portrait photos.
• Use either your DSLR or iPhone, but the DSLR is almost always going to produce better results.

General Photo Tips

Lastly, here are some general tips on how to prep for and take photos to make your website interesting and visually impactful.

Have a plan

• Create a must-have list of shots before your shoot.
• Sketch out some thumbnails of your ideas.
• Also take impromptu shots when you’re on site.
• When you think you’ve taken enough photos, take 5 more.

Composition

• Produce a variety of compositions using the rule of thirds, centered composition, diagonals and triangles, foreground interest and depth, rule of odds, etc.
• Take photos from different perspectives: consider using a stepladder, or placing the camera low to the ground to create interest.
• Pay attention to vertical lines (like on buildings) and horizontal lines (like the horizon) and try to keep them vertically and horizontally straight.
• Consider including people into the landscape to communicate the usage and scale of the space; make sure they’re appropriately dressed for the environment.
• Take both wide shots that take in the whole scene and closeups to capture the details.

Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash

Orientation

• Take more landscape photos than portrait.
• For every 5–10 landscape photos, take 1 portrait.

Quality

• Use the highest resolution setting available on your camera.
• Use a tripod to capture the sharpest photos.

Lighting

• While having a handful of photos taken on bright sunny days is okay, you want to mostly avoid taking photos at midday (unless it’s overcast).
• For the best lighting, take photos within 2–3 hours of dawn or dusk.
• Take photos on cloudy days for a softer “diffused” light and better details.
• Take advantage of ‘bad’ weather to allow nature to express visual mood. Take photos just after it’s rained for more saturated color and reflections or when it’s foggy to create interesting highlights and shadows. Freshly fallen snow and ice-covered branches create beautiful effects, too.

Conclusion

It’s a good idea to take photos of your landscape architecture projects for marketing purposes. You can use them on your website, printed marketing collateral and on social media. You want to make sure the photos you take are high-resolution shots including lots of details and in a variety of compositions—both wide and closeup—and with a variety of lighting environments to create the most visual interest. Practice! And follow cues from aspirational websites in your field.

Also, I know many very talented photographers in the New York Metro area. You could also consider hiring a professional photographer to shoot one or two projects to showcase a particularly special job or to feature as your home hero image and still have plenty of room for your own photographic masterpieces.