Between 95% and 99% of internet visitors will not leave a blog comment!
Almost all blog visitors are lurkers and a very small percentage of those visitors will take the time to leave blog comments or to interact with your site in general. In fact your blog’s most loyal followers will leave the majority of your blogs comments despite representing only a small portion of it’s total visitors.
The following 10 tips should help you generate more blog comments.
1 - Make it easy to leave blog comments.
A simple and clean comments template located at the end of every blog post works best. You’d be surprised at how many people refuse to leave a comment if they need to enter answers to questions, navigate pop-up windows and figure out what some blury letters spell. Keep it clean and simple.
2 - Ask for visitors to leave comments on your blog.
You’ll notice an instant boost in the number of comments you receive if you simply ask for visitors to leave their opinions. Don’t be dramatic about it but a subtle “I’d love to get reader feedback on this” or other similar request works wonders in blog posts. Asking for comments is a call to action.
3 - Enable Gravatars on your blog.
Gravatars, also known as globaly recognized avatars, allow visitors to display a custom avatar next to their comment. For more information visit gravatar.com
4 - Reward visitors who leave blog comments.
You can reward good blog comments, or regular commenters, in a variety of ways. Widgets exist for example that display the names of those who have left the most comments. Perhaps even more effective would be to simply write ‘great comment’ when you come accross one that stands out, don;t overdo the praise however or it becomes worthless.
5 - Interact with your visitors.
YOU should probably be your blogs most prolific comment writer. Visitors will often have questions or opinions to share, take the time to answer questions.
6 - Humility.
I personaly avoid leaving a comment on a blog when the post author acts as if they know everything and are always right. If I see an author tear into someone who doesn’t agree with them, i’m likely leaving for good if I’m a first time reader. Accept criticism and learn from visitors as much as they learn from you.
7 - Comment on other blogs.
Get active by chosing a handful of other blogs on your subject and interact with them by leaving comments. Keep it short, concise and make sure you share your opinion. I’d reccomend keeping things light but sometimes being controversial works too, if you can keep from becoming anoying. Your goal is to become a regular and allow visitors of other sites to get to know you.
8 - Clean up your blog.
The feedburner chicklet that says you have 7 subscribers is a stain, get rid of it. Pop up or pop under ads, annoying! Cheap articles that took no thought to create mixed in with 500 ads? yuck! Before you get regular visitors, you have a lot of first impressions to make. Clean and simple with neutral colors and a lot of white works best, take advantage and remove any extra code to speed things up at the same time.
9 - Set a goal and blog about it.
Readers will remeber and may very well check in again to see how it’s going. They may not care how YOUR blog is doing, in fact they likely will be seeing if what you’re doing works for their own reasons, but it doesn’t matter. Make an impression by following through with your goals.
10 - Write solid articles.
Write blog posts that don’t sound like dictionary dribble and make sure they engage your readers attention by making them think. A reader with questions and opinions is more likely to interact with your blog.
11 - Yes, 11, you didn’t think there were just 10 ways did you?
Multi-task! If you’re looking for articles that interest you on other blogs so that you can leave some comments of your own… multi-task. Find articles with pagerank that don’t use nofollow if getting pagerank is your thing. Find articles that use the top commentators plugin if raising technorati rank is your thing. Find articles about technology or webmaster related issues if you want to give your Alexa rank a boost. Just make sure you actually have something worthwhile to add. Not all blogs are created equal, some have side benefits.
12 - Enable Commentluv, a wordpress plugin to reward people who leave comments with a chance at receiving visitors to their latest article. Note: not Google friendly if you get most of your traffic from them and not affiliate conversion friendly if you rely on people clicking on paying links to earn money… otherwise - reward your visitors! Try it out here if you like, Popular Wealth is commentluv enabled.
13 - I reserved this spot just for you,
Share something that works by leaving a comment below and I’ll add it to the list. What has worked for you on your blog?
References:
Steve Whittaker, Loren Terveen, Will Hill, and Lynn Cherny (1998): “The dynamics of mass interaction,” Proceedings of CSCW 98, the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Seattle, WA, November 14-18, 1998)
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Always make the posts short and divide it into sub sections.There is no greater repellent than a long continuous post.
I’d add another one BUT that’s a pretty good list already.
I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated lately at how difficult it is to comment on some blogs. I don’t understand WHY the blog owner has to make things so hard???
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You obviously don’t believe in your very first point since you use the Comment Timeout plugin. By cutting off discussion you greatly annoy search engine visitors and thus may lose potential readers/subscribers. It makes you look rude and high handed. Plus you deny yourself the advantages of Google seeing your page as having dynamic content that it should re-spider regularly.
Sure, some people do search for older comments to post on for their PR value. Let them. Just moderate comments for new posters and those comments that have links. That, along with Akismet, will thwart almost all spamming attempts while allowing you to enjoy the benefits of a dynamic web site for both visitors and Google.
Great comment Frank though I’m far from high handed irl.
I use the comment timeout plugin specificaly because I DON’T want Google to think I have dynamic content in older posts. That probably sounds very different from what you’ve read on other sites I’m sure but I base that choice on solid SEO reasoning.
At risk of over explaining…. pages lose pr as they grow older and pass down through the archives. Look at webmasterworld for example, chose your favorite category and look at the archives. You’ll see “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9… 9000,last” as the navigation. ALL of those pages get full pr value from the main index BUT page 10,11,12 etc don’t.. they don’t get a link from the main archive page. By the time you get to page 60 or 70 you’ll see that the pages get no PR from the archive at all… they’re buried too deeply.
On popular wealth I use the comment timeout plugin to manage which pages fall off the pr radar because the plugin allows me to turn off the timeout on any page I want. Highly trafficed pages will have the timeout turned off. The others will fall away into a category you don’t see, still there but getting no PR. Not all my articles will hit the PR homerun but those that do… will hang around a long time in search engines.
I micro manage things to a high degree behind the scenes, i’ve had extreme success doing so on other sites too. Basicaly … do you expect Google to continually spider ALL of your posts forever or do you realise the importance of supporting your BEST articles and letting the mediocre stuff fall off so that it doesn’t leech from the best. I let Google decide whats best too, I’ll write a post on that sometime if anyones interested.
update - I went ahead and removed the timeout plugin and replaced it with the commentluv plugin - enjoy!