7 ways to attract comments in your blog

Blog Commenting

Last Monday marked the day I got my 1,000 comment. I know this is nothing compared to Extreme John’s 10k comments achievement last month but I am still glad I got my 1k comments after 3.5 months of blogging….nonetheless.

Like EJ, a good chunk of it was my own comments. I reply most of the time to other people comments. Still 1k seems a good number whatever which way you look at it.

So you may ask, so what good does comments bring to my blog?

Very good question. Comments are the life blood of blogs. If your article is the heart, then comment is the blood pumping around your blog. Comments make the blog alive and interesting. Can you imagine Problogger and Shoemoney blogs without comments? Neither do I. So even if we can write world class articles and perfect content, without comments it would be boring. It would look like just any article you find in an online newspaper. No interaction means boring. Boring means less regular visitors which translates to less traffic too.

If Content is King then Comments are your prince and princess. They make your whole blog lively and fun. I see excellent write ups and articles all the time but with very few or no comments at all. Do you think it encourages me to leave my own comment? Well to tell you the truth, more than half the time I just leave and go to another blog. This is why it is important to interact with your visitors too.

So how do I attract more comments to my blog?

Another excellent question. Let me tell you what 7 things I’ve learned for the past 3 months of blogging to attract comments.

1. Ask questions. Post an interesting article and ask questions in the beginning and at the and of the article. This way you are encouraging your readers to have their say and express their thoughts about your article.

2. Make it easy for your readers to leave a comment. This is very elementary. If you want your readers to leave their comments then please don’t make it double hard for them by putting captchas or making them logged in first to something before they can leave their comments. 95 percent of the time I just leave instead of leaving a comment and I guess most people gets annoyed too on those situations.

3. Don’t over moderate. You know how most bloggers moderate comments before getting it published? Usually the industry standard is after you approve a comment from a particular person, succeeding comments gets approved automatically. Some set their auto approval after 3 approved comments and its still tolerable. But I see some blogs always moderate all comments even if you’ve been commenting on his/her blog for many months or left dozens of comments already.

4. Interact and Reply. This is very important as you are letting know your visitors that you welcome their comments and you actually read their comments. This will create some connection between you and your visitors and some of those visitors will become regular readers of your blog.

5. Add comment plug-ins. CommentLuv and KeywordLuv are two plug-ins that will help encourage comments. CommentLuv shows the commenters article link at the bottom of his comment while KeywordLuv can help in associating the commenters blog to a set of keywords he/she choose. It like a small prize for taking their time to leave a comment in your blog.

6. Do not spam. Do not spam. I have to say that twice so it will sink in. Leave a useful comment and you will get it back. If you are putting a link back to your blog, make sure its relevant to the topic on hand otherwise don’t do it.

7. Make your blog a DoFollow blog. If you are using a wordpress platform, just install the Do Follow plug-in to remove the NoFollow attributes automatically. I know some of well known and most popular blogs are NoFollow blogs. And I hate it. But I think they have their own reasons. If your blog attracts 10k visits each day then I guess you are better off not reading this article. Also if your blog attracts that many visitors, you might find it hard to moderate clever spammers. Nonetheless my blog will be always a DoFollow blog.

These tips are proven in my blog and it attracts comments to my blog one way or the other. Another example is a friend of mine who is blogging for almost a year, asked me a couple of months ago how I was able to get people to comment on my blog. I told him some of these tips and sure enough his blog slowly but surely attracted comments day after day. His traffic improves too as an added bonus.

So what tips do you follow? Do you have anything to add to get more comments to our blog?

Please share your thoughts below.