Posted on Friday 4th of January 2008 at 12:48 in Blogging

6 ways to get users to comment on your blog

It's a problem a lot of bloggers have - how do you get readers to comment on your blog? You may have a thousand readers a day but if users aren't commenting on your blog then it'll look quiet. So how can you invite more active participation? It's all about usability and understanding the mindset.

I have a very strict philosophy on Seopher.com - I encourage conversation, debate and feedback but I don't necessary want to know anything about you. That's not me not caring about my readers, it's the opposite. On this site (as you may have noticed) I only ask for your name. I don't want to know your email address because I don't need it for anything. I don't care what you call yourself (as long as it's not "seopher", that's banned) - all I care about is your opinion. That leads me into my first point:

1. Users want to give you the bare minimum
I don't capture emails because I don't want to; it puts up this mental barrier between the blog and readers because it's sensitive information. Why should I need to know your email address just so you can place a comment? I find that asking for the bare minimum of information encourages more users to participate because there's an anonymity to it that invites discussion.

2. Invite participation
Unless you're inviting questions, feedback or being controversial users have no incentive to comment. If your post is "I did this today", most people will read that and navigate away without an opinion. However, if you're asking "what's the best [x]?" then you're likely to receive feedback. It sounds stupid but many bloggers forget that readers won't offer a comment unless you invite them to do so; be that implicitly or through the subject matter.

3. Don't be afraid to be controversial for the sake of comments
This was covered slightly in #2 but it's a worthwhile point. If you're really not getting any comments at all it can be worthwhile being a bit controverisal to generate some activity. Common ways of doing this are by picking on something that is popular within certain niches - because the fanboys will come over and feel compelled to give you their opinion. You may need to keep your head down to avoid the abuse but it generates activity rather well.

4. Comment on other peoples blogs
Yes I know you hear this all the time but it's true - active participation elsewhere not only works as a vague link-building campaign but it invites niche-specific users back to your website. Write insightful comments on other blogs within the same niche and some users will follow you back to your site; here's hoping they want to participate too.

5. Befriend bloggers
There's something to be said for us bloggers - we like to express our opinions at every given opportunity. Therefore if you make friends with other bloggers, comment on their sites etc, then through mutual commenting you'll all have active communities. It's surprisingly simple but having 3-4 comments against a piece of content does make all the difference.

6. Incentives!
If all else fails you could offer an incentive for commentors. If you capture their emails you can run a competition outlining that "every comment placed on this blog this month enters the owner into a draw to win a Nintendo Wii". This is a rather effective way of doing things and can work in numerous other ways to your advantage - but I'll discuss that in a future post.

There you have it; 6 ways to encourage users to place comments on your blog. However I find it encouraging to only capture essential details like the user's name - I don't like supplying my email address to places that don't really need it.

 

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