“Readers are Plentiful, Commentators are Rare”
People start their own blog for many reasons, it may be to connect with the people having same interest OR they like to share info OR they might open it to earn a little extra cash while having fun. Despite of any reason of starting a blog, we cannot ignore that it includes a lot of effort and time to get all the stuff in the right place. The blogger must be rewarded for his/her efforts. And the blogger gets rewards when he succeeds in making readership and loyalty of their readers. So, having a decent number of comments on every post is required. But HOW to encourage people to be a part of the discussion you are starting? People are tired, busy or lazy enough to comment on your posts.
I am listing here, 8 tips that you can use to encourage comments on your blog posts:
- Provide Incentives to Your Readers: You should always consider the efforts of your readers that leave comments and provide incentives for the same. This doesn’t mean that you should give a free gift to everyone who comments on your blog. There could be a possibility to offer a premium plugin OR Theme to the person who leaves the maximum comments. This will encourage others also to leave comments.
- Write Posts on Tutorials: Most of the readers comment because they need your help or any kind of advice. Writing tutorials will help in increasing comments because there might be some readers that are not able to complete the instructions given by you in first hand. So they will post queries to you thus making an increase in no. of comments.
- Control Spam, make it clean: Spam, a great problem in Internet world not only on blogs. To retain the quality of the blog, you should delete the spam comments. As spam comments contain almost offensive links, that makes the degradation in the value of blog. You can use plugins for that. The most effective plugin is Akismet.
- Write Engaging Posts: Engaging, controversial or posts about thoughts do not have a definite ending. You can always ask readers to leave their own thoughts thus an increase in comments. For e.g.: If you write a post about the ‘Future of Facebook’. then this post will have a controversial ending. You can always ask your readers “Leave whether you think Facebook will have an ending or not and Why”. There will be a decent no of comments if all is well.
- Seek Advice: Every one likes to give his words of wisdom to others. Great. You can always ask your readers to give you advice, suggestions, tips on any topic. In your stars are on your side, then there will be a possibility of some cool no of comments. It can also provide you valuable suggestions and the readers will also be a part of your site.
- Reply to Comments and Start a Discussion: First of all make sure you reply to all the comments. And the second thing, while replying to a post don’t use a stocked answers like ‘Thanks For the Comment etc etc’ instead post a answer that the other one can also comment. For e.g. “Thanks For visiting, Do you have any advice for us” etc etc. It will thus create a discussion and the others would also like to participate. Result of all: Increased Comments.
- Make it easy to leave comments: Make it almost easy to leave comments on your blog. Remove all the barriers like Register to comments, captcha code etc. People are almost busy to leave comments and by adding these barriers will almost zero the hope that the readers will leave comments. You too think on your basis, Do you like to leave comments on the website that ask you to register before commenting?
- Use Commentluv: Commentluv is a great service that adds the recent posts link from the feeds to the comment left by the reader. It highly encourages the bloggers to leave comments because they will get juicy backlinks from your site and would love to comment again and again. Download the plugin from here.
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