Increasing The Number Of Comments On Your Blog

I read a post on Ajay’s blog yesterday about some changes he made to his site to give it a fresh look. I copied one of the changes he made and asked him how he’d made another change, as I think they could help increase the number of comments I receive on my blog.

At the moment I think I receive about 35-40 comments per day. The reason why I want to increase this number is that these comments tend to be spread out over a lot of posts, so sometimes the latest posts can take a while to get any comments, if any at all. I tend to make 4-5 new posts everyday and if I made fewer I might receive more comments as it would be easier for regular readers to keep up, but at the moment my priority is to grow traffic and get more readers.

So, I’ve added the Show Top Commentators Plugin to my blog which shows the top 10 commentators each week on my blog, along with a link to their site. Hopefully this will provide an incentive for users to leave more comments so that they are listed in the top 10. I’m also going to follow JohnTP‘s lead by linking to a post from the top commentators every Sunday as an additional incentive.

I’ve also added my Comments Feed to the list of feeds that are displayed when a user clicks on an RSS link within a browser. I didn’t realise that WordPress doesn’t do this automatically although it is easily fixed. All you have to do is find the following line in your header.php file:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />

and add directly below it:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Comments Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?>" />

Once you’ve done this then your comments feed should now be listed alongside your main feed. I’m hoping that this will lead to more readers subscribing to my comments feed as at the moment I only have 5 subscribers, and I think 3 of them are me!