I think one of the principal motivations for people to maintain a blog is to exchange opinions and improve your thinking. By leaving comments, visitors can improve your article and give you pointers that you can follow. I think most bloggers are happy to receive comments, in fact it's unusual to find a blog that has comments deactivated. This post discusses how to get more comments.
Comments are an important part of a blog. They are a way to get feedback and they increase the value of a page to visitors. Furthermore, if you can engage your visitors they are more likely to come back and link to you.
How to attract (more) comments to a blog?
On this blog, there are post that were seen by several thousand visitors and are yet without comments. Therefore, I want to start with a disclaimer: I don't really know, how to attract more comments, but I am trying and I would be happy if you could give any useful advice.
First, let's get the obvious out of the way.
The Blogger Commenting System
There many nice commenting systems, like disqus or echo, but let's be honest, Blogger's comment system lacks many features, including comment threading, social networks aggregation, and comment voting. Out-of-the-box the visuals of Blogger's system are unsightly and it takes some extra work to make comments look good.
Why is it then that only few people on blogger use these superior comment systems? Because people are rightly afraid to loose on SEO when outsourcing their comments. The problem with blogger is that only javascript widgets are allowed, so all content that is delivered to your page by widgets is invisible to search machines (apart from slowing down the page in the browser). This means in particular that all comments made on your blogger blog with a comment system other than blogger's do not contribute to your search engine traffic.
However, there are a few things you can do on blogger to make commenting more bearable. Most of these have been discussed ad nausea on many blogs already, so I only shortly mention the most important points. It is easier for people to comment if you embed the comment form on the post page (done in settings->comments). People don't want to be carried to a different page for commenting. You can allow anonymous comments for people who don't have open-id accounts or for various reasons don't want to take the hassle to log in. I am currently allowing anonymous comments, but I use pre-moderation of comments, so that no obscenities or link spam comes through.
I think there are many ways that blogs can improve the commenting system in blogger starting from styling the comment section to several technical things. You may want to see my post on how to hide deleted comments in blogger on one of the technical things.
Normally links in comments are given special tag, no-follow which means that search engine spiders do not take them into account when they spider your site. Using do-follow gives incentives for people to comment, however my worry is that it will maybe not attract the right kind of comments.
Motivating People to Comment
How else to motivate people to comment on your site? Let's ask more in general, why do people comment?
I think, there are several reasons. Most importantly, I think is that they like the blog and the posts. I think there is a minimal requirement that the blog should look acceptable. As for myself, I usually only comment on posts that are reasonably well-written and I think it's often very well-written or high-impact posts that have a high number of comments.
If I find a post very superficial, I think, I better improve on that post by writing a new one than explaining in comments everything that was left out.
Another reason why people leave comments is personal involvement. There are many things that bloggers can do to increase the involvement of visitors. Some time ago I posted on social networking features in blogger and wrote about some of these aspects.
Often comments are reciprocative between people. Finally people often ask questions regarding issues they want resolved.
It probably helps to end your posts with a question. On the bottom of every post, I have a message animating people to discuss. It looks like the one with which I am going to end this post.
How do you animate people to comment on your posts? What motivates you to comment?
This post was inspired in part by the post Optimise your comments page in blogspot blog.
U COMMENT
I FOLLOW
Posts
What motivates me to comment?
First, how easy is it for me to comment, I always find myself leave the post if there is too much of steps for me to do before I get to comment on the post. Such as signing in, verification, and stuffs. I know these options needed to fight spams, however bloggers don't have to on all types of protection. Maybe just moderate them.
Second, of course is the content of the post.
Third, I don't know. I tend to comment on posts that are already have comments. It sounds like they are having a discussion.
For my blog, I open the comment for anonymous users too. I used to on the word verification, however I find it annoying and not necessary as I have already on the comment moderation. It's good to know that blogspot allow the individual post comment setting now.
Hi Emily, thanks for your feedback. You make some important points.
Similar to you, to facilitate commenting, I also have captcha verification disabled. I think it's also important to enable open-id in the blogger comment settings to make it easier to comment for people with an account other than google's.
I just changed the comment system on this blog a lot to make it easier to comment, to make comments look more appealing, and I put a subscription link on top of the comment form. It now seems that the blogger comment system is not that bad at all. Just now I disabled pre-moderation of comments, because I found a way to hide deleted comments completely (if I'll get a lot of spam I'll switch to pre-moderation again). I think it is very nice to see your comment appear directly once you press submit or post.
I'll blog on some of these changes later.
BTW, do you also have problems sometimes when you press "post comment" before pre-viewing? If this is more widely spread one should put a warning with the messages on top of the comment form. Something like "preview before posting."
I installed disqus on 3 blogs and it performs very well. The only issue is when the same content is found on 2 pages, the comments for the content are split.
Hi Steve, good to hear about your experience with disqus. As I wrote in my post about using other commenting systems specifically in blogger, I won't use it, because I am using blogger and it's bad for SEO. You use wordpress where things are different and I think on wordpress I'd also use disqus, because of the advantages it provides including that you can track your comments everywhere. As for your problem with split comments, I don't think any commenting system can solve them.
@Emily
that is just amazing thats just what i used to do and feel before i started blogging on my own.Come to think of it and as shocking as it sounds even i generally posted where there were already comments present.
Now im totally miffed .
@Benjamin
ave made my posts n blog more comment friendly n looking at Emily really do see truth in her words. I too am looking for relevant comments .
so what do you figure would be a course of action. bumping up your own post to buff it up?
i know people on the forums do it to attract initial reader attention.
I like to comment if I have found the post compelling.
Questions work but also I love to read peoples comments if I'm trying to find an answer to a problem - I comment if I have an answer to problems too. It feels like I'm giving back
@Aditya Game Programmer: First, sorry for taking so long to answer. I was very busy.
I think YouNetBiz and Emily give several very strong motivations why people comment and why not and I think they make for a very good first course of action: write articles that people want to comment on. You can compare articles on blogs that are heavily commented and others that have no comments. I think you'll find in many cases that heavily commented articles are controversial, relevant to people, and/or well-written. Important also is to get to know and earn the trust of people so they comment on your blog.
The Top Commentator plugin for WordPress works well because when one manages to make it to the list of top commentators, he or she gets listed on every page of the site. If the owner of the site hasn't enabled nofollow, then this is a huge amount of backlinks and people will certainly love to comment to get tons of backlinks in exchange.
That's certainly a good tip for people who use wordpress. In blogger there are also several plugins for comments or commentators, however they use javascript and are therefore not effective for pagerank. I use do-follow comments to give some link love.
For my blog, I open the comment for anonymous users too. I used to on the word verification, however I find it annoying and not necessary as I have already on the comment moderation.
Comments is more important for blogs because it can increase the values of pages and also blogs are get good branding. blog comment are helps to improve the knowledge. thanks for your god information.
Top Commentator plugin for WordPress is working well, because when you can make a list of top commentators, has been listed on every page of the site. If the site owner does not use nofollow, so this is a huge amount of backlinks, and people certainly love to get tons of backlinks to comment on the exchange.
Subscribe to replies to this post
This conversation is missing your voice. Your feedback is appreciated.
Post a Comment
You can use some HTML tags, such as <b>, <i>, <a>
You can follow the discussion of this post by subscribing.
You are free to include information from this article on your own site if you provide a backlink. You can use the following markup: