This is a guest post by Lee Ka Hoong from MyBlog2Day.
Comments are an important element in a blog, a blog without comments is like a cage without birds, which is not fun at all. Blog comments are important for a blog as readers would share their experiences and opinions regarding your article topic. Therefore, you may be able to learn something new from the comments.
When you visit a blog and see that there are less or no comments on every single post, what will you feel? You might feel that the quality of content is poor and doesn’t attract anymore to leave a comment, and then you’ll leave too. It’s important for us to do something to increase the participation rate in our blog, it adds value to our blog.
Here are the 10 ways to increase comments on your blog:
1. Simple And Useful Content
When writing a blog post, make it simple and easy to understand. If you write something in too much detail and technical, it definitely pisses off your reader because it’s complicated for them to leave a comment and share their thought.
2. Call To Action
Ask a question at the end of your article. Shoot a question to your readers and ask for their opinions or ask them to answer your question. Again, make the question as simple as you can.
3. Comment On Related Blogs
All of us know that blog commenting is a way to drive traffic, build backlinks and brand. You might know the concept of “you comment and I’ll comment back”. When you leave a comment in a related niche blog, the blog owner may be interested to know who his reader is and what his blog is. This is what I used to do to see who my reader is, I’ll leave a comment if the blog has article that attracts me.
4. Hold Blog Commenting Contest
This is hot and many blogs are holding similar contest on their blog. As what you can see in SmartBloggerz, Sushant held a “Commenting Idol Contest” few months ago and the contest page itself received up to 369 comments. All his following blog post received at least 100 comments each. This is a good way to increase participation rate in your blog, but you have to really control and modify the quality of comments left on the post, it may take your lot of time away.
5. Make Your Blog Dofollow
People love dofollow blog because they can get one way dofollow backlinks for their blog to improve the search engine rankings. In fact, there is no harm to make your blog dofollow as long as you control the quality of outgoing link, just make sure there is no outgoing link to spam site, then it would be safe.
6. CommentLuv WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv is a popular wordpress plugin. When your reader leaves a comment on your blog, then the plugin will track and display the latest blog post of your reader’s blog at the end of his/her comment. Therefore, your reader would receive a backlink to his post plus some traffic through the exposure. It encourages your reader to leave comment.
7. KeywordLuv WordPress Plugin
Nowadays, blog owners are used to modify each comment left on their blog and they ignore commentator who uses keyword in the name field. KeywordLuv allows commentators to get a keyword backlink in their comment in the form – “YourName@YourKeyword”; it improves the search engine ranking for that particular keyword.
8 . Top Commentator WordPress Plugin
It’s widely used by many bloggers on blogosphere, this is a plugin which shows a list of commentators who leave the most comments on the blog, as what you can see in the sidebar of this blog. Usually links in top commentator widgets are dofollow.
9. Build A Community
Build a community in your niche and you could get your readers coming back to leave a comment again and again. Of course, building a community is tough but it’s not an impossible task. You can try to help any bloggers to resolve their problems when they have doubt, you would definitely get the reader to stick with your blog.
10. Reward Your Readers Monthly
You may do it with the list of top commentator. You may reward the top 3 commentators in the list of top commentator some prizes every month, such as cash or banner advertising in your blog. As we know, people love free prizes especially cash.
Wrap Up
There are many ways through which you can increase the participation rate in your blog, these are what I did on my blog and I found them very useful and effective. Quality content is still the main key to make a reader to read the full article and leave comment.
Do you find these ways effective to increase comments? What other method that you use to increase comment on your blog?
[Admin Note: Do check my article – “15 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Comment System Better” for improving the experience of your blog’s commenting system. ]
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I hate to say it but I think the ComLuv and KeywordLuv are the best ways of attracting commenters, not great content sadly…
.-= Jorgen Sundberg´s last blog ..5 Ways to Boost your Twitter Profile and Attract Followers =-.
yes i think you are right and we have to work for it, btw nice post and i am trying my best to get some more comments on my blog and but my blog is about tech news and there is few of my blogger friend are always comment on my blog
.-= MostlyBlog´s last blog ..iPhone 4G/HD 16GB Prototype Leaked Images =-.
Thanks for the tips Lee. I don’t get a lot of comments on my posts even though I write useful content and have high ranking blogs. But I also don’t have most of these things in place so I will work on that.
.-= Trent Brownrigg @ Earn Money´s last blog ..How to Make Money Right Now =-.
This is a great article with very useful tips. One of the things that I am trying to improve is the amount of comments that my blog receives.
Thanks,
Jenn
Hey Lee,
Great Post bro. I think contest is the best to increase comments…!!
and We can also create a “Thank you page” for a first time commentator 🙂
Thanks for sharing this great post.
Great post, Lee. I practice steps 1,2,3 and 9, plus I have a top commentator widget. However, I agree with other methods you covered here and consider to add some of them.
Additionally, including relevant links/trackbacks to various resources inside your posts and after it is a good practice to bring readers and comments.
.-= Omer Greenwald´s last blog ..How to detect wordpress and wordpress plugins =-.
Very nice and concise post!
I’m not a blog pro at all, but I’ve found #2, the call to action is the easiest and most effective way to encourage posts (at least for me). I know that quite often I’ll read a blog post, think, “interesting” and then move on. If there’s a question, or “hook” for me to answer, I’m likely to do so (if I have an opinion on the subject, or something to contribute).
Agree about do-follow things. I always have interest to commenting in a do-follow blog. But i think this method is only attracting people if your blog have a good page-rank. I just know about keyword luv, it will attract a lot of comment surely. Yeah i know, spammer rate will also increased, but we’re know it can be managed using Askimet.
The best way to get comments to blog is reply to the comments that readers post. If there are no comments the visitors consider the post as dead ones. Also never mind approving comments that is relevant to the post. I mean the moderation should be liberal.
I really like the concept of the top commentator, it is like rewarding our loyal subscribers or readers who always participate on our blog entries by commenting by a do follow link. It helps to increase interaction and loyalty of our readers. And by the way, commentluv mixed with keywordluv is simply perfect 😀