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.