Samantha Garner, Freelance Web Writer & Editor

I have been a bad blogger. I haven’t been feeling the love lately, to be honest. I’ve been viewing blogging almost as a chore, rather than the fun hobby it’s been since 1997. To be honest, a lot of it is down to a couple of projects I’ve been working on that have taken up a lot of my time. I’m having corrective eye surgery next week (ack!) and won’t be able to do any work for a few days and so am making sure things get done early.

Don’t get me wrong, these are fun projects and I’m not by any means complaining about them taking up the time they are. But they are sapping my will to blog, a little bit. This, I suppose, is exactly the time that the “write posts in advance and queue them” advice comes in handy, non?

Anyway, blogging, I hope you’ll forgive me. I could use some tips on blogging despite complete disinterest, if anyone has any they’d like to share.

So you have a great client and are working on a great project. Everything’s moving along great. Everything, in general, is great. But are you sure?

Are you meeting your clients’ expectations?

Despite the dramatic, TV-movie-style ending of that intro, really – are you sure? It’s not always in our nature (as freelancers, humans, what have you) to look a gift horse in the mouth. This means we may be so uplifted by a smoothly-running project that we don’t realize we could actually be underperforming. Maybe you forgot you’re not charging this client for revisions. Maybe you overlooked a small portion of a certain deliverable. Maybe a deadline is coming up sooner than you think and you need more input from the client. These things are often small, but important to remember.

Ask your client. Check your contract.

Is your client happy with your work? Ask! Check your proposal or contract to make sure there are no surprises on either end. Pay attention to every deliverable and every deadline. Consider performing a task ahead of time. There’s no harm in being awesome, right?

We’ve all been in a honeymoon period in some relationship or another, where you didn’t care if the other person ate loudly or made bad jokes in public. That doesn’t mean they weren’t problems for you. The thing is, would you rather it be addressed now, or when you’ve been together for years?

I need a comment policy.

I had been gathering some comments in my spam queue that I flip-flopped on for a while. Now, I know what obvious spam is. Comments that are full of irrelevant links, or comments that are clearly not related to my post at all get deleted right away. But what confused me were the comments that seemed like they could be relevant, despite having a site listed in the Website field that existed only to hawk a product.

I went back and forth about it for a while and then consulted Twitter. There wasn’t really a consensus, but one friend of mine said, sensibly, “Aren’t they all sales websites? lol. If you are suspicious of their intentions then don’t approve them. It’s your house.”

So I approved one of them. I did so because this comment, while it could have been self-serving, did seem like it could also be contributing to my post. I approved it and thought no more about it.

Until I got another comment on another post that was exactly the same.

Well there. I got burned.

I’ve decided I’m going to craft an actual comment policy. It will say, basically, if your website is set up solely to sell your product, you’d better go out of your way to leave me a comment that is 100% relevant to my post. Not copywriting, not art, not the title of my blog. It might sound harsh (and I doubt that spammers will even read it!), but it has to be done.

What do you think? Do you have a zero-tolerance policy on comment spammers or do you often get burned like me?

(And yes, I know I might get comment spam on this post. At this point it would actually be funny, cosmically.)