3 ways to increase comments on your blog

Most people say that a blog without comments is like a forum without posts. That’s not true, at least for me as I run a few blogs and a few forums and can say with full confidence that you can keep blogging away even if no one comments or even visits, however, forum where no one posts automatically turns into a dead ground, on which no one wants to step in.

TopTut.com has a decent traffic and rather small amount of comments made weekly, some of which are even negative, nonetheless I do not implement any of the tactics I am going to reveal here, simply because I don’t care how many comments this blog gathers. I know I share useful info, I know people do read, I know visitors return, and that’s pretty much enough for me. But anyway, since most of you do want to see an annoyingly long list of comments below each post, here are a few basic tips.

1. Deactivate the “nofollow” ref. This is probably the fastest and easiest way to get comments from a big amount of readers (including accidental guests) daily without any hassle. All you need to do is download the Nofollow Case by Case plug-in, install it, and put a badge or write in big letters somewhere on the most visible position, that this blog “follows” or something similar, which will let the visitors know that leaving a comment in your blog will count towards their website’s ranking. Basically, this plug-in removes the default “nofollow” ref from each external link in the comment, and therefore allow every commentators to get some links love off your blog. I implemented this technique on my other blog, Now G Net (which is PR3 and I assumed people would want to get some PR3 backlinks) and ever since the plug in installation I get a few comments daily.

The disadvantage of this tactic is that you end up with tons of irrelevant comments; for instance I happened to visit a blog that “follows” in which the admin posted how bad she felt today, describing her rather crucial health problems… with a comment bellow “Very useful info, I enjoyed reading, thanks for sharing! I bookmarked your blog for further visits”. Oh? Well, bear in mind that no matter what you will post, 50% of your comments will be of that nature (if not this exact text), be it your funeral announcement or SEO essay.
2. Give top commentators a sidewide link. This strategy requires more hassle on visitors part, and continuous participation, while the top ten commentators get a featured link on the sidebar / footer of your blog. If your blog is still small, the upside is that people can easily post a few comments and make it to the top 10, while the downside is – after a few comments they won’t bother to maintain the activity, knowing that the blog is not very popular and their comments count won’t be massively beaten any soon. Therefore I’d say this idea is better be implemented on big and popular blogs, where commentators will get a bigger exposure for their links and need to comment a lot to beat the competition.

3. Make provoking posts. This is the invisible button you can press on, just by making entries in your blog that will touch visitors feelings (don’t have to be in bad), and encourage them to have a say. Most likely they would feel the urge to comment only if they strongly disagree and get pissed off by your opinion, so implementing this method will require to have a controversial, maybe a bit edgy blog, and the question is – is this what you want? I personally prefer to maintain an educational blog that helps and teaches, rather than makes visitors angry, but you have to remember that there are tons of cynical souls out there who prefer to read poisonous posts of a bitter blogger over a boring article about web development. Having said that, I adore the bitter bloggers.
That’s it, these were my 3 tips. It’s up to you how will you force your visitors to comment, however, I guess needless to say that you cannot bring out technique nr. 1 and nr. 2 together, for obvious reasons. If you liked this post, please digg it, or subscribe to my feed.