7 Ways to Get More Blog Comments
Posted by Mike | Filed under Blogging
Every blogger likes to see people reading and commenting on his posts. Comments are a sign of an active blog, and I’m sure that no one wants his own blog to be called a dead community! So let’s get straight to the point… you want more and more comments? I’ll tell you seven (7) ways to get them. 
1. Allow people to comment. Most of you will say, “Duh!”… I know this is obvious, but there are some bloggers who wait for comments to come when they actually disabled the commenting feature! If you’re using WordPress, go to “Discussion” under the “Options” menu to enable commenting.
2. Give your readers the option to comment via their feed readers. Some readers don’t even bother to visit your site; they just read your articles via their readers. In short,they’re just lurkers. They don’t participate in the “community” because they’re just too lazy to visit your site. Allow them to comment via their readers and you will see an increase in your comments.
FeedBurner allows you to do this, just activate FeedFlare. Under FeedFlare, you’ll see checkboxes and put a check on “Comments Count”. After doing that, subscribers will see the number of comments just below each syndicated post. They can just click that to leave a comment. 
3. Respond to comments. Your readers will feel abandoned if you don’t interact with them via comments… Don’t leave them alone! Discuss the post with them by replying to their comments. I’m sure more comments will come your way if a discussion starts.
4. Encourage your readers to comment by putting a question or something on your post. For example, you posted about webmasters going wild because of the PageRank update. Before you hit that “Publish” button, write something like “I want to know your thoughts about this. Are you one of the people who go crazy over PR or do you just accept whatever PR your sites got?”. Doing that will surely attract more comments.
5. Don’t ask people to register before they can comment! There are some bloggers who don’t quite get it…
ALL WE WANT TO DO IS COMMENT ON YOUR POST.
Nothing more, nothing less. Don’t ask people to register so that they can comment. If you’re afraid of spam, then you may choose to moderate posts before they appear. There’s also a thing called spam protection, in case you didn’t know.
6. Write interesting posts. Hmm… this tip should have been number one or maybe number two… 
Anyway, if people don’t see your article as a thought-provoking one, then don’t expect comments. Period.
7. Reward your commentators. This can encourage them to leave more comments. Currently, I’m running a top commentator for the month contest. The winner will be given $10 (Yep, $10! Go ahead, laugh at me.) at the end of November. Now you have an idea on how to reward them.
So there you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this post! If you have something to add, please do so by commenting. Thanks! 
Great tips - as always. I’ve been watching the increase in discussion here on the WWW Observer and it just makes me want to interact more and more.
However, I would recommend that comments shouldn’t be turned on until you actually have people that will comment. Blogs with 0 comments on every post often look… bad.
Good posts, all very true.
Great tips all–especially on turning on feedflare. I completely skipped over that when setting up my feed
I also tend to agree with Tanner that comments should probably only be on if you have enough visitors that you think people will comment. I read somewhere that you don’t want to advertise the fact that you don’t have many visitors. Meaning leave the polls off as well.
Good article. I have the Feed Flare option disabled because I read that you should force people to visit your site in order to leave comments. I’ll have to rethink that strategy because I think you’re right - people just want to take the easy and simple route.
I also see that you are using yet another technique - allowing “dofollow” links in your comments - this must also help a lot.