Nowadays, Blogging is considered as the best internet marketing tool through which you can share your knowledge and expertise.
Apart from search engine traffic, the blog helps in creating a community and start a conversation and get peoples opinion about it.
You might have noticed many blogs with less traffic, but very high conversation rate. Such blogs are eye candy for Advertisers, as people tend to trust and follow such active blogs and thus advertisers get their value for money really well.
At ShoutMeLoud, we have already covered many posts regarding commenting, and it’s pros and cons, in case if you have missed some of them, here is a quick refresher:
- How commenting can help you get 1000 Subscribers in a month
- Five commenting Etiquette every blogger should know
A blog with thousands of great post without conversation is like a dead man walking; there is no point that you would like to trust that blog.
For example, When Harsh has written about Bluehost Review, many people commented and acknowledged that it’s one of the best WordPress Hosting on the market. This way, any reader landing from the search engine are more likely to trust many people acknowledging about the product and thus more sales for him.
In this post, I’m not talking about how to drive traffic but will be helping you to increase engagement via commenting.
Although, on the internet, you will find lots of articles regarding traffic-generation for your blog. Even on ShoutMeLoud, you will find a lot of posts which delivers information on how to drive traffic to your blog or website!
These tips are generic and can go with any type of Blog, be it BlogSpot, WordPress, Tumblr or any other blogging system:
Working Ways to Increase Blog Comments and Conversations:
Faster loading blog will get an Edge:-
A fact, everyone loves a fast loading site, be it a visitor or a Google bot. In fact, a fast loading site helps in improving your search engine ranking. If your blog takes a lot of time to load, then your visitors won’t stick around. You should know that with advancement of social networking site like Facebook, Twitter, the attention span has gone down to a greater extent.
More over a blogger who is commenting to increase his online presence, would prefer commenting on a blog post which loads quickly. If you site takes ages to load, here are some useful tips which will help you to speed up your blog:
Perfect and easy Commenting System:-
This is another factor, which determines the number of comments on your blog. If your blog Commenting form is a nightmare for the commentator, don’t expect to get lots of comments.
Using a commenting form which helps users to input his field instantly, would be very useful. On WordPress, I prefer the default commenting system or you can use some advanced commenting system like Thrive comments. At ShoutMeLoud, Harsh uses Thrivecomments, and he has shared his review about the same here.
Especially, I hate BlogSpot blog commenting system, as they are a mess to comment on. Always remember fewer clicks for your readers will help them to browse more pages from your site and similarly one click commenting system is essential.
You can also consider adding Facebook commenting system, which is said to increased conversation rate on your blog and also decreases down the spam comments on your blog.
Though default commenting system is good enough, if you integrate multiple login options like Facebook Connect or Twitter login, you might notice a huge increase in comments for traffic coming from similar sites.
Read:
- Engaging Your Readers: Here Are The 8 Best Comment Plugins For WordPress
Reply To The Comments:-
To start a conversation on your blog, you need to be a part of it. If you are an admin and reply to all the comments, you are doing it right, but you can always use it for more exposure.
For example. When a commentator reply, you can always acknowledge and appreciate his comments, and along with it, you can also ask a question to initiate a conversation.
If a commentator finds a problem with his solution, you can always suggest him to subscribe to your blog to keep receiving such useful tips and updates. For any followup comment, you can always add a link to your earlier post and this drive traffic to old posts and also decrease bounce rate.
Place A ‘ Top Commentators ” Widget On Your Blog:-
Top commentators plugin shows the top commentator for a particular time frame, and it’s setting allows you to change the link to Dofollow after a certain number of comments.
This plugin encourages other bloggers to be an active part of your blog commenting to get a dofollow backlink along with targeted traffic.
Conduct Contests Between Commentators-
This step is based on the idea – ‘ Reward & they will come often’!
If you conduct contests by giving some gifts or rewards to your top commentators, then comments will certainly flow on your blog like a river.
I use to giveaway 1 or 2 ad slots on my blog to the top commentators of a particular month. This step can certainly increase the number of comments on your blog. However, this last tip works best for a new blog. For a well-established blog which is selling ads, this might not be an idle decision.
I think that these tips will certainly help the new blogs to grow on and to increase the percentage of conversations on your blog !
Have you enjoyed the article, do let me know !
Also, here are a few hand-picked guides for you to read next:
- How To Allow Image Uploads In Default WordPress Comments
- 7 Things to do From the First Day of Blogging.
- 5 Excellent Websites for Checking Google Keyword Rankings
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I prefer using the Default WordPress Comments and Facebook Comments!
For browser plugin I use Autofill Forms (Firefox Addon).
btw Nice Post!
I think the think blogger get interested to is comluv plugins, it helps readers get solid free backlink to their blog. Since I have made my blog comluv i can see the difference.
All are correct. Every commentators need something back. If you mentioned about CommentLUV, do you think that SML should get it enabled?
Oh boy, Comment LUV plugin surely does some wonders to number of comments. Have it on you blog and watch the comments pour in.
Comments are good, but there are too many comment spamming softwares which spoils the blog.
Hi Priyangshu,
I like your idea of reward and rule, this idea will give you so many quality comments. And Quality comments are very helpful to generate quality discussions.
Thanks for sharing 🙂
Comments are really good for your blog. It drives conversation, community interaction, and it keeps the readers come back and become regular. The thing is, a lot of blogs uses spam protection plug ins that sometimes even the good comments are filtered out and webmaster won’t even see them. I think for small blogs I recommend that they filter out comments on their own and only use spam protections once they have traffic of comments that they can’t handle.