I’ve been reading some excellent articles on this topic recently and although I touched on the topic yesterday, I thought it deserved a post of its own so I can share what I’ve found to be useful.
Tips To Get More Blog Comments:
- Get new commentators involved by converting existing lurkers. Post directly to them and ask them to comment!
- Look into addressing the reasons why readers might not be commenting on your posts.
- Take positive action towards encouraging blog comments.
- Provide an incentive to encourage posting.
Can you think of any more?
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Post something controversial and link to someone you think would disagree strongly you!
Point 3 is interesting – I think you need to strike a balance between inviting comments, and looking desperate.
I’ve found in my blog that the more forthright I am in asking for opinions on posts, the less likely people are to actually give them!
Another thing to consider about asking for comments is how small you’d feel if you didn’t get any!
Cue the tumbleweed and the sound of crickets…
Well, if you have interesting, fresh and original posts on your blog, the posts will always get lot of comments. That can make the blog sticky and get repeat traffic. And in my opinion, once the readers get benefitted by some comments, they also would start contributing by sharing their knowledge. There is no real need to ask for comments. Let it be a natural process.
I’d certainly agree that it’s a major factor! It leads me to thinking about another factor… Traffic! Without traffic, the most interesting, freshest and original content on the web won’t get comments. Perhaps, that’s the topic for another post?
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand you fully. Could you please rephrase?
Will, what I mean is there are many visitors to the blog who prefer to be silent watchers. At some point or other, they will get some useful knowledge from the blog posts and comments. If they get benefitted from the comments, they will understand the importance of sharing knowledge and how knowledge grows by sharing; and soon they will start contributing actively.
Ah, I see!
Presumably, someone who has been a silent reader for a while would have already been benefitting or else they wouldn’t have continued visiting?
If nothing else changes, what might cause a silent reader to suddenly want to contribute?
Another thing that’s creating a barrier on my commenting on Stu’s blog is the (in)ability of comment spam protection plugins to identify genuine comments.
I’ve just tried to add the following comment onto this blog post and got a message telling me that it had been queued as spam and that I should contact the webmaster by email.
Pah. I don’t want to resort to email and there’s no other easy way to contact Stu (except to ping his blog from mine!). To be honest, this is the second comment I’ve placed on Stu’s blog to be sucked into the spam hole.
The other side of this particular coin is that I’ve recently had to manually remove a couple of spam comments that Akismet had let through. The comments themselves were pretty generic, but the author’s link was porno. A difficult call for Akismet to make.
Aaargh, Stu’s blog has just binned another of my comments!
Dude, I don’t know what’s going on. I do know that spam karma is saying that you’re trying to dump some sort of javascript payload in your comments. I don’t know what that’s all about, but I’ve added your doman and IP to the whitelist, so comments should get through now.
Sorry
No worries, Stu, but my IP’s dynamic! The next time I restart my router, it’ll change
Damned dynamic IP’s!
Not sure about the javascript though?
There weren’t even any links in some of the comments! The only thing I can think of as a potential trigger is that I posted a few comments within a short space of time.
Could be it!
That doesn’t encourage me to post a lot of comments on your blog!