Over time I’ve written a lot here about how blogs help you market your mediation services.

All well and good. These days, if you’re going to blog, you need a good spam prevention plan to go along with your ADR blogging. Spammers use computers and hire real people to fill out the comment forms at the bottom of your posts, flooding your site with spam. I know some bloggers who have become so overwhelmed by it that they’ve either disabled their comment box or prevented anyone without a Blogger account (if they use Blogger themselves) from leaving a comment.

It need not be so dire a solution. Disabling your comment feature diminishes the dialogue-building potential in your ADR blog, because your readers can no longer start or contribute to the conversation you begin with your blog posts.

The key is to have good spam prevention services that work with your blog. I use WordPress blogging software and find that Akismet, combined with Spam Karma and Bad Behavior (the trio some call the Trusted Trio), prevents virtually all spam from trickling through. Better yet, these three work so that I don’t even have to deal with most of it. Good thing too, when you consider that Mediator Tech‘s had 20,000 spam comments captured in 18 months.

When you’re working with someone to start a blog, or evaluating blogging software, be sure to evaluate the software’s potential, either on its own or with the help of “plugins” like those listed above, to keep the spammers at bay.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.Lenski.com.