If you’re like me, you’re a blogger that thrives on comments. Getting loads of traffic on a post is awesome, but if I can get a load of comments responding to my post, I do back flips (in my mind).
If you’re not like me, that’s okay. We’ll help you get some comments anyway.
Here are some tricks for getting more comments, that I’ve picked up throughout my experience as a blogger. They might just work for you too…
1. Challenge your readers to think about something differently
If you can do this well, nothing will get your more quality comments. Either people will refuse to look at something differently, and feel the need to express their commitment to their current beliefs, or you’ll open their eyes to a whole new way of looking at something. Even if you don’t believe in your stance, playing devil’s advocate is a comment magnet.
2. Start a list and ask for additions.
When you’re listing out tools, tips, tricks…whatever. Open it up to the readers at the end to submit their own tips. Hell, take it one step further, and when a reader comments with a good addition, edit your post and add it to the list with credit to the commenter.
3. Keep it short. Ask the questions without providing all the answers.
If you provide both sides to an argument, or answer every question, that’s awesome…just not if you want to get a lot of comments. Your readers want to be part of the discussion, so be sure to leave them something to talk about.
4. Don’t include tweets as comments. People see 72 comments and they’ll be less likely to comment.
If readers think their comment will be lost in the noise, they won’t comment. When I see a comment thread loaded with tweets (especially if they’re not separated) I am much less likely to comment. Also, if you include the “twitter mentions” in the count for # of comments on a post, people will be less likely to comment.
5. Ask for thoughts at the end of the post.
It’s a simple concept. Chris Brogan probably does this best. At the end of every post, ask for your readers thoughts. Sometimes, that’s all it takes to get a reader to share their opinion. It shows that you want to know what they think.
6. Respond to as many comments as possible.
The reason for this is the same reason as #4. People comment with the hope that their comment will be read. No one likes talking to a wall. I try to respond to every legitimate comment I receive so that whether you’re a first time reader, or you’ve been reading since day 1, you know I’m listening, and I care about what you think.
7. Ask for thoughts on Twitter
Everytime I plan to put a post that is meant to provoke conversation, I make sure to ask the same question on twitter before the post. Aside from getting comments, it’s a good way to gather some information and insight for your post. It also gets people thinking and talking about the topic so that when your post goes up, they’re ripe with opinions to comment on.
8. Continue the conversation off the blog
One thing I love to do is quote a comment in a tweet, and ask for thoughts on the comment. Once you get the conversation started on your blog, it can help to spread it to other communities. “Here’s what my readers thought, what do you think?”
9. Respond to a popular blog post that got a lot of comments
If a blogger wrote a great post that hit a nerve with their audience, drawing a lot of comments, you can share your thoughts on the topic in a blog post response. It’s clearly something that people care about so while your post probably won’t be as big as the original post, you can still drive a good conversation.
Make sure to link to the original post, and let your readers know that you’re responding to it. This sends some link love to the originator, gives your readers some context, and will probably leave a trackback comment on the original post leading people to your response.
10. Reward your commenters for commenting.
If all else fails, bribe them. Now this certainly isn’t a long term solution, but giving a prize away can inject a little life into your blog quickly. If you still want quality, say “whoever has the most creative response wins this awesome bag of potatoes!” or whatever you crazy kids are giving away these days.
Also, check out a plugin called Commentluv. It will add a link to the commenter’s last blog post. It’s a win win.
David Spinks is the Community Manager for Scribnia, where the world’s bloggers and columnists are reviewed by their readers. He also blogs at The Spinks Blog about business, careers and professional communities. Want to guest post on HowToMakeMyBlog? See more info here.
Image by Mike Baird.
Join thousands of bloggers and get all my blogging tips for FREE! Subscribe to HowToMakeMyBlog via RSS or via e-mail.
If you liked this article, you may also like:
Why I run my blog on Thesis Wordpress Theme
Thesis theme gives my blog a professional, clean, easy-to-read layout and SEO friendly design. Thesis makes it simple to make your own blog unique. See more details and get your own Thesis today.
{ 38 comments }
Hey David,
Really Great Post. Those are some awesome tricks.
Thanks for sharing. Great work david.
~Dev
Thanks a lot Dev. I hope it helps (=
David, Scribnia
well done , man. trying to follow your site.
Okay, I like the title! It worked by getting me to read the post. I don’t normally like to ‘trick’ my readers but desperate times happen… lol I must say it’s a good bag of tricks. Tried most of them, except the Twitter discussion before and after post. Seems worth trying but you need chatty friends — many of mine just pubish tweets or retweet mine and rarely respond to direct questions. I must get new friends…
I know #5 works. I did a post about Chris’ one paragraph post getting hundreds of comments — that one started some discussion…
Thanks for the nice list.
Hi David
Another tip that I’ve noticed some sites do that seems to get them little or zero response, is to almost turn their blog into a product blog!! I personally think that they could do these sorts of things much better by asking questions and challenging their readers. I think that you’ve got some great ideas here, thanks David and I’m looking forward to using some of them.
I think you have to understand your goals. Perhaps getting a lot of comments isn’t in their best interest, and it’s not something they want to focus on.
You’re absolutely right though. Many bloggers are too product focused, and then wonder why they don’t get any comments. They need to focus more on their readers.
Some good ideas here. I already try to do some of them, which is easy if you only have one blog and not many commenters. But I have six blogs and I have been neglectful of them.
I am currently working at updating my blogs, and I will be trying out some of your suggestions. Thank you.
Nice sum up. I’ve seen rewards for commenters but one which really caught my eye was giving adspace to the highest commenter. That’s some incentive.
Very interesting idea…
I’ve seen bloggers list the readers who comment the most in their sidebar, with a link to their blog.
That is a Top Commenters widget and I was just reading about them the other day in a traffic tips blog. The idea was to look for blogs with a Top Commenters section that relate to yours and see how many comments it would take to get on that page. Then you would have backlinks on every page in the blog through that widget.
Great incentive to post comments, especially on a do-follow blog. However, the blogger needs to be vigilant to make sure that spammers don’t in and take the top spots.
Truth. Spammers could be a big problem when using a plugin like that and akismet certainly doesn’t catch everything.
Also, I guess you should think about the quality of comments on your blog. If you entice your readers to comment more often, that may come at the expense of quality in their comments.
Food for thought.
I don’t think the quality of posts will degrade if you’ve presented a good topic (like you’ve done here). There will always be those who just want to chime in with “great post”. (Perhaps a “Like” button would be a way to allow them to express their appreciation without cluttering up the comments section.)
There may be a few who will try to spread out their comments throughout the blog (reducing the quality of each comment) to try and get on the “honour roll”.
But for the most part people will want to discuss what you’ve presented and conversation ensues.
Really great advice!
/m
Great list
It’s refreshing to see people remove the “Tweets as comments”, I found the same as you, people want to connect with me in the comments, not a range of tweets.
Have you tried nested comments? That usually does well for me
Hi Rhys
Please excuse my ignorance, but what are nested comments?
Cheers
What you’ve done there so you reply to comments:-
i.e.
My Comment is here
—- Reply Here
——-Reply to reply
—- Reply Here
New Comment is here
—- Reply to new comment
Hope that explains it
Hi Rhys
As a newbie to blogging and I’m really just starting out, I appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me.
Cheers
Personally, I think that if your’e going to include tweets in your comments, they should all be at the bottom of the comment thread. Even then, they can be annoying but then at least it’s easier to distinguish the real comments from the tweets.
David, Scribnia
Great tips, I will be putting these into play right away!
One thing that I think is important is to make it easy for them to comment. If you invite comments and then force people to jump through hoops to give them then you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
I’ve written a series on comment spam starting at http://blogs.wcnickerson.ca/world-wide-web/blogs/2010/06/battling-comment-spam/
One of the issues that I addressed was how many attempts to reduce comment spam make it harder for legitimate readers to post comments. There is a balance between keeping the spam out and letting the conversation in.
Loved this post! I will def be putting these tips to use. Thanks Spinksy!
No problem McKenny!
These are all fabulous ways – they really are. I have been getting a few more comments on my blog as well and I truly love the community I’m slowly building up.
I comment on a lot of blogs and Tweet and share of Facebook if I think the article is that GREAT (as this one is!) and I agree that if you want comments, you’ve got to do something about exposing the article and make it show you’re interested in wanting more.
Great article, obviously!
Responding to the comments keeps your readers engaged to your blog. Yes, you need to respond to as many comments as possible.
-Sandeep
Really great article! It’s definitely important to engage your readers. They will keep on coming back to check out new comments and hopefully become regulars on the site.
Thanks David, nice article. I am going to implement all those tricks
. Rest I agree with Chris
Your advice is very valuable to me. Russian internet develops. It was very helpful to read your articles. It would be very nice to translate your article into Russian. Do you have a very much larger audience. Sincerely, Vitaly!
i should really try this, for real
last week, i even place a message “Good Reader always leave a comment even if they can’t” on every single of my post page
you could take a look on my blog if you don’t mind…
I never thought about rewarding my commentators. But now i have planned to implement it. And Thanks for this tips.
Marko – with the Twitter comments, i’m getting comment through on posts when someone mentions me on twitter. Should I be deleteing those so they don’t show up at all or does that impede my SEO? I’ve noticed that tweet comments/pingbacks are coming up on the home page as recent comments too. Not sure what to do with them, can you enlighten?
Sorry that should be DAVID
Inspiring comments is my new project and your advice is very timely. I just modified my last post on sunprotection tricks to include a request for readers to send me their tricks. We’ll see.
Your idea to continue the dialogue of another site’s post in my own blog is wonderful. I did that last month after reading a NY Times post on tanning addiction. I commented on their post and my comment got me thinking about my own tanning addiction as a young adult. I wrote a post on my own site with my story and got nice traffic from it. It was also fun in that the web felt so ‘social’. Gotta love it!
This is an obvious one.. but make sure to allow your reader to leave a link back to there own site when commenting.
2 method which I follow to get more comments are:
1. Ask question after every post.
2. Ask questions which are easier to answer and one should not be a real brainier to answer them…
Often times simply just asking readers how they feel is enough to get people to start commenting.
Thanks for the great advice, has given me some things to think about and work on!
hey,
i went through your tips.. it was really good..
but you know what????i really wanna write..
write on something whole world would be interested
for….at times i feel like writing on life…
what i felt is it is very simple.. but we make it
complicated….
Really practically useful and working tips, thanks!
I would also recommend to add couple of reasons why stimulating commenting is worth to do and important for SEO:
1. Google loves pages with frequently updated content. New comments on a post – are the NATURAL updates. It is even more beneficial as comments are usually highly relevant to your post topic. Google ranks such pages higher in SERP.
2. Many Blogsearch engines also value the speed of comments appearing in new posts – this measure directly influence on your positions in different ratings and Blogsearch engines.
Thank you.