BloggersWalk

One of the key successes behind many big blogs is the comments. Personally, I can’t imagine a blog without comments. It is what differentiates a good blog and an excellent blog. It is also what brings your visitors back, especially if the blogger personally replied to their replies. However, I do realize that even if you post tens and hundreds of quality posts, you may not get so many comments. Here are 7 tips to increase your comment rate.

1. Make your post welcoming!
Maybe your visitors just can’t comment on your post because they don’t see any room to do it. Try to blog in a way so that your post is a quality post, but at the same time, it is provoking the users to make a comment. Blog like it is your forum, just that when blogging, you’re the one responsible for creating all the threads that people reply to. To do that, you need to make your posts welcoming. Even a “What do you think?” line at the end of every post will significantly increase the comment rate.

2. Comment on other’s blogs!
A good portion of blogging is social networking. So what does this mean? You need to go read other’s blogs and make comments in those blogs to form some sort of a network. Usually, if you comment in these blogs, these bloggers will come visit your blog too and probably make a comment. They probably won’t only come once, assuming your content is good, but will come again and again and make more comments if possible. Good?

3. Using a SPAM protection
I have seen quite a few blogs with quite a lot of spam in the comments. Many blogging softwares have ways to deal with problems like spam. For example, WordPress comes right out of the box with a plugin called Akismet. Why not use it? From a visitor’s perspective, I wouldn’t want to make a comment when the five comments above me are spam advertisement links.

4. Moderate the comments
In addition to using a spam protection modification, you need to moderate your comments one by one too. These plugins cannot block all spam. Especially those that were commented by a human, but just sucks. Now, I’m not saying delete all these comments, but a little moderating will take care of a lot of spammy comments and increase the overall quality of your blog. Wouldn’t you want to comment in a good blog?

5. Do-follow is great!
Do-follow is an awesome plugin for WordPress. There are actually quite a lot of variations you can select from. What’s great about this? It is a small reward for those that make comments, by removing the evil “rel=”nofollow”.” If you’ve noticed many blogs that do do-following tend to have a lot of comments!

6. Reward the best
In addition with the do-follow plugin, a show top commentator’s plugin can encourage people to continously make comments. Why? Wouldn’t you make quality comments if a huge blogger said that s/he’ll give you a sitewide backlink on the sidebar in exchange? I certainly would and I’m sure most blog readers would too.

7. Threaded Comments
Threaded comments are an awesome way to get a lot iof comments coming in. It allows a user or you to comment on a specific comment. Brian’s Threaded Comments (BTC) is one of the more widely used plugins, but there are also good variations of the plugin doing the same job. Not only does this allow a healthy and an easy to follow discussion, but especially from the visitor’s perspective, it can be warming to see the blogger making personal replies. I guess that concludes to another potential returning visitor.

After writing this post, I wondered what the title of this post should be, as I think up a title the very last. In my many candidates, one of them was “Blog Like It’s Your Forum!” In fact, I mentioned the “a blog is like a forum” idea in the my first point. It truly is! You need to really begin the discussions!

So, try these tips and tell me how it works. If you’ve got more than these 7 tips, why not share it with me and the rest of the BloggersWalk readers by making a comment below?