Balkhis - Vision For Success

5 ways to attract commentators to your post

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I see alot of new blogs that are being started, but they lack commentators. Even though Balkhis was launched only two months ago , I have manage to get a fairly decent amount of comments, and as you can see the comments are increasing as my reader base grows. I have put together a list of what I have seen a trend with Balkhis that increases the number of comments on post and in general.

Offer Incentives to commentators

Offering incentives to your commentators will keep them coming back to your blog and post comments daily. One of the most easiest and effective incentive you can offer is listing your top commentators, in your sidebar or some other place (Sitewide) and do-follow. I hate blogs who actually pretend to list the commentators but then you see they are no following all the links. If I come in and post a half comment, ofcourse the blogger won’t like it. Just like I don’t like that happening. Though I will say that when there is nice content, I leave a reply regardless of this top commentator incentive or not. Another effective technique is having a contest. You can give out prizes to your top 3 commentators. This might increase your spam a little, but you will get alot of valuable comments as well.

Offer helpful advices / tutorials

Offering helpful advices will definately increase comments on your website. How? Well if you follow all the SEO Advices that I have given then you are very well likely to get decent rankings for some good long-tailed keywords. Which will bring new users to your site, and most will say thanks if they like your advice and even stay on the blog to read more. Example of an advice article I wrote was 5 things that can hurt the Search Engine Ranking Positions of your Website. Now always be prepared to get some negative feedback also. Some people might come and put their opinion that might completely disagree with your article which is fine. Also tutorial type articles like How to add a dynamic sidebar in wordpress? will lead people to ask you questions. You can reply to those questions and have an entire conversation.

Interact with your users

Bringing me to my next point which is interacting with your users. Always ask questions in your post that readers can reply to. Answer questions asked in the comments by your users. Such acts lead to a conversation to build up and more people can participate in it, and put their opinion there. For that you need the special comment mod that I have discussed in this post. It is called Brian’s Threaded Comment plugin which allows user to reply to a particular comment.

Controversial Topics

Controversial topics are another comment attractor type posts. I try to stay away from it for the most part, but they do get tons of comments, and alot of people get heated in the comments which is a downside because blogs are friendly places not a place to start a fight. One of my posts which I wrote about Host Gator scamming people with their marketing technique… actually resulted in 34 comments and even got big enough to have the admin of Host Gator visit the blog and reply. Topics of this sort tend to get alot of comments, but due to the fights and anger I try to stay away from those for the most part.

Offer Freebies

Freebies are one of the biggest user/commentator attractor to your website. Everyone love free stuff right. When they are happy with your free products, they will reply, and when they are not happy they will also reply. You are getting more comments either way plus more page views for your website.

Above are some of the things that I have noticed with Balkhis that attracted more commentators to my posts. You can use the same techniques and get more comments on your posts as well because I am sure people don’t like seeing a 0 comments next to their posts.



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23 Comments

Comment by Not John Chow
2008-04-25 13:11:11

Great Post.

Contreversial topics seem to attract a lot of attention. On Not John Chow dot Com the two posts that have gotten the most traffic were “EntreCard Help is no Help” and “John Chow Killed by Panda”

Being in agreement with everyone else will not make you stand out and will not get you the attention that you crave.


Comment by Syed Balkhi
2008-04-25 15:44:05

Yeah I know I saw your post about John Chow killed by Panda … that was definately a traffic attractor.


Comment by Not John Chow
2008-04-27 18:36:19

And of course [SELF PROMOTION - LINK REMOVED] !

(Comments wont nest below this level)

Comment by Syed Balkhi
2008-04-27 18:53:19

Please refrain from self-promoting. It could be one of the reasons why you have gotten removed from the top commentator list … posting URLs of your site in comments.


 
Comment by Enkay Blog
2008-06-18 10:52:18

As states, Not John Chow is definitely NOT JOHN CHOW at all. I dislike self promotion on my blogs!


 
 
 
 
Comment by Dr. Teeth
2008-04-25 18:41:26

thats the perfect way, i am also conducting a contest to attract and reward my viewers


Comment by Syed Balkhi
2008-04-25 18:43:00

yup yup I know I have seen that contest … its coming along well .. good luck with your aventure.


 
 
Comment by Chetan
2008-04-26 10:42:55

Offering incentives and controversial topics are the best ones to get more comments and commentators to blogs. Its what i have seen in my blog too.


Comment by Syed Balkhi
2008-04-26 10:44:13

yup yup … I think this is the case with most blogs .. people love controversies …


 
 
2008-04-27 07:40:09

[...] the users at the end of each post feel free to comment. Why should they comment ? Read more about how to attract comments to your posts. Also you are wondering how will you ever let your users know that you are offering full feed rss. [...]


 
Comment by Nisha Gunness
2008-04-30 05:10:57

Well, your ideas are quite inteesting and everyone wanting their viewers to get attracted to their blogs they must do things that u told and even ponder on other things that are much nicer than you mentioned.


 
Pingback by Best of April 2008 Subscribed to comments via email
2008-04-30 12:54:06

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Comment by Yan Subscribed to comments via email
2008-05-06 10:15:53

I really like the idea of writing something controversial. Well, it’s something to ponder about. I think it’s about time I allocate some space to place the ‘Top Commenter’ on my sidebar.

Thanks!


 
Comment by Khyle
2008-05-16 03:26:19

When my blog was just starting out, I was just dying to have a lot of commentators. I did happen to do all your ideas.

But now my blog has a lot of commentators even though i don’t offer some inventive and I couldn’t catch up anymore.

nice ideas there syed :)


 
Comment by Rakhshinda
2008-06-17 11:55:40

Good post, Most of the time the only thing that attracts me are incentives and good topics.And specially if they talk to they’re users and help them out like you do it becomes a real biggie.


 
Comment by Enkay Blog
2008-06-18 10:52:51

I have seen that contests are the best way to gain readers fast as they start looking around and noticing your content and start to think “well, this blog wouldnt be so bad to read as it is” and then you have them converted!


Comment by Angad Sodhi
2008-06-18 15:05:02

Totally agree with you. Contests are best ways to get comments. What better example than us!!! :P :P :p


 
 
Comment by Angad Sodhi
2008-06-18 15:09:28

Must try out your techniques. When I started dropping almost 300 ECs a day, I got a lot of traffic back. And since these are mostly webmasters themselves, they do comment. My comments have thus increased ever since!


 
Comment by Chetan
2008-07-08 13:07:07

Keep on blogging, we need you. I’ve got so much useful stuff from your blog and really value you opinion in this stuff.


 
2008-08-19 07:31:37

[...] I have shared tricks before on how to attract commentators on your blog. But showing people the button is another nice way of attracting [...]


 
Comment by Ralph Jenton
2009-05-12 14:51:43

I’ve learned a lot from this site – I hope you continue writing because I love your stuff!


 
Comment by raju Subscribed to comments via email
2009-09-09 05:27:10

very useful.. super boss


 
Comment by raju Subscribed to comments via email
2009-09-09 05:27:59

its very useful article.. keep it up always


 

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