7 Ways To Increase Commenting On Your Blog
Feb 14th, 2007 by Kalle
It is not a secret that every blogger wants more comments in their blogs. We can’t seem to get enough of them. Below is a list of 7 things you can do to increase the commenting on your blog, enjoy!
1. Top Commentators Plugin
This plugin is a great way to increase the commenting on your blog. It will display the top commentators at your sidebar along with the number of comments they have made and a link to their site or blog. This plugin has increased commenting on this blog a lot. You can get the plugin here.
2. Threaded Comments Plugin
Most people have visited a blogpost that has a lot of comments and have wanted to answer something in the post, but then understands that it will be almost impossible for the person you are replying to to find your comment. The comments is a mess and it is hard to find any structure of the comments.
There is a very good solution to this, Brian’s Threaded Comments. It gives all the comments a “reply to this” link. When replying to a comment you comment will show up under the comment you are replying to. You can see the plugin up and running at this blog.
3. Ask for your readers opinion
It is very important not to ignore your readers. After all, without your readers your blog would be nothing. Ask for your readers opinions on things that you write about. This will not only give you comments, but more loyal readers.
4. Subscribe via e-mail
It is a good idea to give your readers the oportunity to subscribe to the comments in a post via e-mail. If they choose to do and get a reply they will most likely come back and read/answer that reply. This is great because it will give you more comments and pageviews 
You can download the plugin here.
5. Make quality comments on other blogs
Yes, that’s right. This will probably bring you the most comments, aslong as it isn’t very popular. Simply read other blogs in your topic and leave kind quality comments in their posts. If the blog you are commenting to arn’t flooded with comments, the owner will most likely visit your blog and check it out and hopefully leave a comment.
6. Get visitors and PR
The more visitors and the higher PR your site has, the more attractive will your Top Commenters list be. So more visitors will start adding comments to your posts, so they can appear in that list.
7. Contest!
I saved the best for the end. If you want gain visitors and comments at your blog, a contest is the fastest way to go. The best contest for comments is a comment contest (surprise, surprise). An example would be; the one at the top of the Top Comenters widget by friday 6:00 pm gets an iPod. If you havn’t got any comments before that contest you sure will afterwards
Try to make a deal with a company to give you stuf to give away in your contest, if you in return write a review of them or something like that. If you arn’t able to make any good deals, the best thing you can give away is money. Everyone is interested in money, so everyone will participate.
Wow.. Impressive post! #6 needs some clarification and you never mentioned about Subscribe to comments plugin
Wow, I like the “reply to comment” feature!
BTW - here’s another way to get lots of comments … create a post called “7 ways to get more comments on your blog!”
totally!
:)
Have changed it now. Realized that it was quite unclear what I meant with it
Dont forget to promote you site via social networks like this one: mybloglog
I have had a surge of comments since I joined…
To this day, I never really understood why comments were important. They make you feel good, but are they really necessary? And yes, I do want them, I just am not quite sure why they are important. Never was really.
Comments help users feel as though they are part of a community.
I do have issues with your comments on 7. Contest:
Placing rewards on user interaction doesn’t always bring the most beneficial return to a site. If you run a contest that the person with the most comments get an iPod, what do you think the quality and the demographic will be? Low quality, high volume by a young demographic.
Not saying that contests are a bad thing, just take care to make sure you get the bank for your buck.
#5 by far is the best for getting comments.
I’ll have to try that threaded comments plugin
Keeps the comments section looking clean…By the way, is page rank directly affected by traffic?
No, PageRank is about how many links you got to your site. Don’t think it is affected by traffic at all.
Google page rank is only effected by inbound links…
Yea, I would agree that the comments should be more focused on quality than quantity. Having a contest for that would usually not turn out the way it should.
Having said this, do you hold on to and moderate comments, or just let them flow freely?
Actually I don’t moderate the comments at the moment, but if I see any unwanted comments I will remove them.
Same here.. it feels weird when you write a comment and it doesn’t appear on the page.
I don’t moderate after that first comment by the poster has been left. I like free flowing comments.
7 Smart ways, interesting and to the point, those are the posts I like to read. Seems like it’s working for you
Came to this blog through Digital Point. Wowww its great
I need alot of help in this area. Great suggestions (I mean, other than the plugins, which should probably be no brainers…I think). Contests seem to work well on a few blogs lately. I just don’t have any pens, hats, or other cool stuff to give away.
[…] 7 Ways To Increase Commenting On Your Blog - Kalle […]
John Chow is the best!!
Im going to have to download the “Top Commentators Plugin” tommorow morning, thanks for that link!
I wished there was a Top Commentators Plugin for Blogspot. Number 3 seems to work best for me. Last time I asked my readers about my blog designed I had 110+ comments!
Kalle -
Great read - and accurate too. I found your site because you’d followed your own advice (#5).
I’d love to hear you elaborate on #6.
I have two notes: 1) the subscribe to comments via email plugin is huge. I hate leaving comments and then having to check back to see if anyone replied to my comment. 2) I think #8 should be don’t moderate comments. Nothing is more frustrating than leaving a long comment and then not have it show. I always wonder if they will ever review it and post it or did I just waste my time.
You don’t need to subscribe to comments via email.. there is also http://co.mments.com which allows you to track all the comments you left elsewhere on one page!
Funny….I just started a “contest” for people to guess my TV viewing habits today.
http://www.wildtangents.net/2007/02/21/guess-the-tv-shows/
[…] 7 Ways To Increase Commenting On Your Blog If you want more comments on your blog posts, check out these 7 tips. (tags: blogging) These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
Thanks ilker, I’ll try it out. However this puts the onus on the user to find and use co.mments. The subscribe option makes it a no brainer for them.
That is true.. but then again I sometimes get frustrated to see emails coming from comments (especially those that get a lot of comments) obstructing the way to more important emails.
It’s just my opinion but there you go.
Thanks for replying Josh.. I was tracking this post’s comments and just came to my mind.. would “top commentators” lead to meaningless comments just to get a name on top?
like this one?
or this..
Ilker, sure it could … but it also runs the risk that the blog owner marks you as spam. If too many blog owners mark you as spam, Akismet puts all your messages into spam on almost any blog.
I have a few commenters that always get pushed to spam and I need to dig them out, simply because they comment too much on other sites.
OK i will stop now.. but you get the idea.
feel free to delete those
Wow this post sure has a lot of comments, i was reading posts on here and it was like, 0,0,1,32! what the
Nice little article!
Good article.
I’m a little confused by your comments system - why do you have 2 subscription boxes for comments? Are they for the same thing? I imagine not, but it isn’t clear from the wording.
Thanks for letting me know Anita.. I don’t use Wordpress but I have heard of Akismet (maybe I should switch to WP as well?)
I like your blog. It is a very interesting one. astonishing, profound, central nothing comparative to profound
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To make up for the comment pollution I created while trying to illustrate a point, I made a post with a link here. Hope you like it! =)
Thanks for the post. Really good and helpful summary. I’m implementing the plugins today.
is there a top commentors plug in for blogger?
Lol guess what I m doing 6 of them except the last one.I guess that will be my next target …soon.
One thing about threaded comment i have seen is when you get the comment you dont know from which thread the comment came.This is very annoying on blogs where you have like 70-80 comments.If the author of the plugin can give a fix it will be a good idea.
Can’t wait to start working on your very helpful list! Thanks!
[…] Show Top Commenters – shows top commenters on your site. This is one of 7 helpful tips for increasing comments on your site. […]
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