Have you ever felt jealous of blogs that receive huge number of comments?
Did you ever wish to have more comments on your blog posts?
If yes, your wait is over.
Here is a post that will ensure you to get enough comments on your blog to satiate your hunger for comments. Follow these steps to get more comments on your blog and make a community of readers around your blog.
Blog comments are a form of token that certifies that readers have read your posts and the writing resonated with them to an extent that they thought to leave their feedback on the writing.
Blog comments are a way through which the readers can share their reaction of approval or denial in context of the post written. In the same way a writer can get genuine feedback, and can connect with the readers through the comments below his post.
When a new visitor comes to your blog, the first thing he notices is the number of comments received in the blog. If a visitor finds some 70-80 people’s comment on the blog then he surely will have a positive attitude towards the blog. This in itself is half battle won.
Blog comments also help in SEO of your blog. You can use this plugin to get search engine traffic a.k.a Organic traffic for the context of your blog comments. Yes the ones you have not written too. More on this later!
How to Increase Your Blog Comments?
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Tips To Build Blog Community To Get More Comments on Your Blog[/caption]1) Write an awesome piece of content
When you expect people to comment on your blog, you got to have content that catches their attention. Your content has to appeal to them, no matter if it does in a bad way. For every negative comment, you get a chance to let your reader know your point of view and at times you yourself learn to view things their way. This will only make your bond stronger and you will gain a loyal readership to your blog.
2) Ask a question at the end of the post
When you end the post with a question or an attempt for seeking reaction of the reader, you are sure to get their words. Most readers tend to share their point of view on a topic when specially asked for it. This will help you know their point of view on the topic.
Provoking the readers to share what they think of a post will surely make them stay a while more on your blog and comment on the topic.
3) Make a Top X list
List posts are always a favorite among readers. The reason probably is because that they give a sense of finite length. When you make a list of top X (replace X with your favorite number 5, 10, 15 so on) you try to pull the readers towards your post. But, this strategy can be used to gain good number of comments too.
Mostly when you make such a list post, you sometimes tend to exclude products that according to others deserve to be in the list. So when you conclude such a post, ask your readers if you missed a product they thought would make into it. You can also ask if their favorite product or item is included by you or not. Ask them reasons why the items suggested by them should be in the list. This way you get a lot of responses which can be from there on made a conversation.
4) Give them the privilege to share their tip
When you are writing a post, weave sections inside the post to let them know that you are waiting for their tip on the issue. In the conclusion section, you could also ask them to share their tip on the problem the post is related to. Most readers like to share their advice. They will get exposure through it and you will get comments.
5) Use strong CTA
Using CTA or Call to Action, at the end of the post tends to do well. You can ask the users to subscribe to your blog, share it or buy something. But in this case, we need comments so ask the readers to leave one.
6) Cook a controversy
Controversial episodes tend to sky rocket the TRP of the daily soaps. If that weren’t the case millions of people wouldn’t be glued to their TV sets to watch Big Boss or other realities shows.
Similarly controversies tend to do well in blogging too. You can quickly grab a few eyeballs by writing on a controversial topic or by negating a widely accepted theory. People will simply pour in your blog to get their voice placed. You will get handsome number of shares too.
But before taking such a step take care not to hurt someone and always say things that you can back with strong proofs in case you need to defend yourself. Just speaking randomly about a thing and then not having enough proofs to back you off is “suicide”.
7) Blog design
You should not clutter your website with too much ads and any such thing that will not leave your visitors with no room to breathe. This will cause them to flee halfway. Comments are a far thing they will cause you a bounce rate too.
Tips:
- Leave a lot of white space on your blog.
- Use a good font.
- Don’t use a sticky widget that crawls till your blog footer unless that’s the only option. This is because the readers will feel like a cage during the scrolling of blog. Moreover same unchanged sticky widget will make them bored.
8) Use different comments system
Sometimes, your audience might be active on a different medium than the one you might be waiting for them on. So try to evaluate the platform that enjoys your readers’ maximum attention and use it as your commenting system.
For example, if your site is related viral stories, humor or fun stories or pictures of the same genre, chances are your readers are active on Facebook than any other social platform. So use Facebook as the comment system. Still, you can have the standard blog comment facility for users who have a website or prefer not to share their Facebook ID with you. This will work in both ways.
Similarly you can use disqus comment system that has an assimilation of almost of the three popular social networks plus the standard commenting system too.
CERTAIN TIPS TO GET MORE COMMENTS
- Be polite in your tone – Being polite eases the visitor to settle down for some more time on your blog.
- Interact with the replies – When a visitor comments he expects you to share your reaction or reply too. So firstly thank him for his comment. Politely state if you agreed to what he said or not. If you have a different point of view, explain it to him calmly without getting arrogant.
- Don’t fall to your audience’s wish – yes; you should not succumb to your audience’s arrogance. After all, it’s your blog and you have an upper hand. Moreover nobody will eventually love to read to a blog that does not have its own voice or stand. So if someone is bullying you or strongly going against the rules of your blog, moderate that comment to trash.
- Modify your “number of comments section” – Most blogs have the number of comments displayed near the title of the post and at the end of it. Imagine what could be a bigger turn off when your reader comes to see your post was published a week ago and the text near the title displays a blunt “No comments so far”.So it would be wise of you to change the text displayed there to something more inviting like “Leave your comment”, or “click here to comment”.
- Be giving – Nobody likes to visit your house if you don’t reciprocate their visit. Same is with blogging too. In order to get bloggers comment on yours you have to also visit their blogs and comment there. Commenting reliable and relevant opinion will not only strengthen your bond but also will make a community of you fellow bloggers [More on community building later!].
USE OF PLUGINS:
If you are a WordPress user, there are plenty of plugins that will help you get a handful of comments.
- Reply Me- Nobody visits a page for the second time to just see if you have replied to their comment unless it is that important to them. So use reply me plugin that enables the commenter to choose to get notified by email, when the blogger replies to them. This will help you get him/her back to commenting to them by sending them an email after you have responded them.
- SEO super comments – While this plugin in itself will not do anything to increase your traffic this will help you to get the maximum out of your hard earned comments. This plugin will create a dynamic page on your blog for every comment that is published. This means Google and other search engines will think that your blog is updated (which actually is the comment), and will index your website faster for the text that the comment has. This is because your comments are index-able, crawl-able and can also rank for the data in them. Yummy! Isn’t it?
- CommentLuv- Commentluv plugin is by far the best way to get more comment on your blog. What Commentluv does is that it gives a link back to the commenter’s site after the comment. This link can be from the most recent 10 posts of him.This will make your blog a hot cake because everyone would like to get more exposure from leaving links to recent articles of them. You got comments and they get exposure and link back.
You can also choose to make the links dofollow or nofollow as you wish. I would say make them nofollow. - GASP + Akismet = No SPAM. The combination of these two guardians will save the blog of yours from spam comments.
Building a community around your blog
If you wanted to build a community around your blog which is always fruitful, read on.
Adrienne Smith, the engagement superstar of blogosphere gets an average of 200 comments per blog post on her blog. Yes you heard that right. If this was not enough let me tell you her most popular posts have over 550 comments. How did she achieve this feat and how you can get it?
She has spent years in building relationship with bloggers beyond blogging. She has reached up to them on social sites and also takes the comment moderation seriously. These are just a few that appear obvious from the outside. However she was kind enough to release a product of hers to let everyone know the secrets that led to her success.
Over to you
From the above writing I would not repeat anything but just want to say that blog comments can help you in blogging. They can help you in building authority, in ranking for user generated content, in getting to reach even more people.
Would love to here from you...