My Quest for Comments

In an effort to get some reader participation here, I'm posting these 10 Tips To Get More Blog Comments that I received in an e-mail from Popular Wealth's Stuff to Blog About! I also learned alot from these tips and will be taking action on some of them as well...

Did you know that between 95% and 99% of internet visitors will not leave a blog comment!

Almost all blog visitors are lurkers and a very small percentage of those visitors will take the time to leave blog comments or to interact with your site in general. In fact your blog’s most loyal followers will leave the majority of your blogs comments despite representing only a small portion of it’s total visitors.

The following 10 tips should help you generate more blog comments.

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1 - Make it easy to leave blog comments.
A simple and clean comments template located at the end of every blog post works best. You’d be surprised at how many people refuse to leave a comment if they need to enter answers to questions, navigate pop-up windows and figure out what some blurry letters spell. Keep it clean and simple.

2 - Ask for visitors to leave comments on your blog.
You’ll notice an instant boost in the number of comments you receive if you simply ask for visitors to leave their opinions. Don’t be dramatic about it but a subtle “I’d love to get reader feedback on this” or other similar request works wonders in blog posts. Asking for comments is a call to action.

3 - Enable Gravatars on your blog.
Gravatars, also known as globally recognized avatars, allow visitors to display a custom avatar next to their comment. For more information visit gravatar.com

4 - Reward visitors who leave blog comments.
You can reward good blog comments, or regular commenters, in a variety of ways. Widgets exist for example that display the names of those who have left the most comments. Perhaps even more effective would be to simply write ‘great comment’ when you come across one that stands out, don;t overdo the praise however or it becomes worthless.

5 - Interact with your visitors.
YOU should probably be your blogs most prolific comment writer. Visitors will often have questions or opinions to share, take the time to answer questions.

6 - Humility.
I personally avoid leaving a comment on a blog when the post author acts as if they know everything and are always right. If I see an author tear into someone who doesn’t agree with them, I’m likely leaving for good if I’m a first time reader. Accept criticism and learn from visitors as much as they learn from you.

7 - Comment on other blogs.
Get active by choosing a handful of other blogs on your subject and interact with them by leaving comments. Keep it short, concise and make sure you share your opinion. I’d recommend keeping things light but sometimes being controversial works too, if you can keep from becoming annoying. Your goal is to become a regular and allow visitors of other sites to get to know you.

8 - Clean up your blog.
The Feedburner Chicklet that says you have 7 subscribers is a stain, get rid of it. Pop up or pop under ads, annoying! Cheap articles that took no thought to create mixed in with 500 ads? yuck! Before you get regular visitors, you have a lot of first impressions to make. Clean and simple with neutral colors and a lot of white works best, take advantage and remove any extra code to speed things up at the same time.

9 - Set a goal and blog about it.
Readers will remember and may very well check in again to see how it’s going. They may not care how YOUR blog is doing, in fact they likely will be seeing if what you’re doing works for their own reasons, but it doesn’t matter. Make an impression by following through with your goals.

10 - Write solid articles.
Write blog posts that don’t sound like dictionary dribble and make sure they engage your readers attention by making them think. A reader with questions and opinions is more likely to interact with your blog.

11 - Yes, 11, you didn’t think there were just 10 ways did you?
Multi-task! If you’re looking for articles that interest you on other blogs so that you can leave some comments of your own… multi-task. Find articles with pagerank that don’t use nofollow if getting pagerank is your thing. Find articles that use the top commentators plug-in if raising technorati rank is your thing. Find articles about technology or webmaster related issues if you want to give your Alexa rank a boost. Just make sure you actually have something worthwhile to add. Not all blogs are created equal, some have side benefits.

12 - I reserved this spot just for you,
Share something that works by leaving a comment below and I’ll add it to the list. What has worked for you on your blog?