6 steps to make your blog visitors loyal commentators

Back in November 2008, I wrote a post on how to increase the number of reader comments on your blog. The blog post touched on the subject of making your blog readers loyal commentators.

Having loyal readership is a very important part of having a successful blog. Having large RSS readership, having lots of loyal readers and commentators, is important as your readers are the lifeline of your blog and will help your blog grow by spreading the word about it to their friends.

In this article I will analyze some of the latest trends in making your blog visitors loyal readers, regular commentators and part of your blog community.

Promote a reader comment into a blog post

• Chris Brogan recently introduced the “Post from the comments” category, where he promotes interesting comments to his posts and publishes them as an entirely new blog post. This encourages visitors to write insightful comments in hope of hitting the front page and getting great exposure.

See how I did this on my blog: Reader comment on guest blogging and on implementing blogging tips.

Use blog comments as inspiration for articles

• You can choose to answer a visitor comment in a new blog post. Read all your blog comments, respond to the questions and consider answering some good questions in a brand-new blog post. Your blog comments can be a great source of inspiration for your blogging and in this way you can encourage visitors to ask questions in comments to your articles.

See how I did this on my blog: How to make your blog stand out

A personal “thank you for commenting”

• Send unique and personal emails to your commentators. I recently commented on a blog post at Cash Money Life and a day later I received a “thank you” email from Patrick, the blogger, with a response to my comment. And this was not a plugin that sends a generic email to all commentators, this was a personal response. I complimented Patrick and here are his thoughts on personal e-mails:

Thanks, Marko. I try to respond to all comments that require  a response. It is sometimes a daunting task though because I write a lot of informative type articles which receive a lot of questions! Still, the nature of my blog is to try and help people, so it is important for me to give responses, even if people only visit that one time. And sometimes it brings people back, which is even better!

Social media users comment more

• Social media users seem to write more comments than an average user. My articles that go popular on StumbleUpon also seem to get more comments. And StumbleUpon users stand for a large number of them. So focusing on building relationship in social media sites is not only good for your traffic, it also increases the number of comments.

Use Twitter for research / inspiration

• Twitter is not only great for building traffic to your blog, it can also be very useful when researching the topic of your upcoming post. Ask a question in Twitter, collect the answers, publish them in a blog post and comment and analyze results / trends. Then thank the people who responded to your question and tell them about your article.

See how I did this on my blog: To give out the best post or not

Just be approachable and friendly

• Be approachable and friendly. Answer emails you get, respond to tweets you get… thank people for retweeting your message, for submitting your article to StumbleUpon and other social media. Basically build a relationship with your readers.

Incorporating these tips into your daily blogging can bring you much closer to your visitors and encourage them to stick with your blog, subscribe to it, become regular readers, commentators and a part of your blog community.

Image by KevinDooley