Increasing The Number Of Comments On Your Blog

March 5th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

Top Commentators

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!

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About the Author

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Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 7 News.

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There Are 31 Responses So Far. »

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  1. #10

    Comment by Enblogopedia on 5 March 2007:

    Well, the threaded comments plugin will be a great idea, indeed!

  2. #9

    Comment by Dan and Jennifer on 5 March 2007:

    Hey Everton,

    We’ve seen a significant increase in comments since we made these 2 changes a few weeks ago:
    1. installed the Top Commentators plugin
    2. added the MyBlogLog avatar plugin to comments

    Next, we’ll be adding the threaded comments plugin - seems to do wonders for John Chow. It actually gives your comments more of a “forum” feel which is really great for getting more people involved back and forth.

    Just haven’t had the time to do it yet since our comments template is already heavily modified and we’d basically be replacing it. :-)

    Also we’ll be adding a “recent comments” plugin to highlight older posts that are still seeing action…

    * Not sure which one of these to go with though, there are 10 of them out there. Suggestions? * Our theme doesn’t support widgets btw, so just looking for a simple low-overhead plugin to list the recently commented posts.

    Have an awesome day!
    Dan

  3. #8

    Comment by Ashish Mohta on 5 March 2007:

    The idea sounds good but then many people are using feedburner redirector plugin.In that case this wont help

  4. #7

    Comment by Enblogopedia on 5 March 2007:

    Sorry Everton, I don’t know what`s happening to me these days…a lot of studying are driving me crazy :(

    Anyway these are the Dofollow plugins I found. 1st and 2nd

    Have a nice day.

  5. #6

    Comment by Everton on 5 March 2007:

    Well Everton, Technorati count the link..so I think it`s “dofollow” now;)
    did you modify it?

    no, haven’t touched it yet. What do you mean that Technorati sees the links? Do comments you leave here show up on your inlinks?

  6. #5

    Comment by Enblogopedia on 5 March 2007:

    Well Everton, Technorati count the link..so I think it`s “dofollow” now;)
    did you modify it?

  7. #4

    Comment by Everton on 5 March 2007:

    can someone post the link to dofollow please? I’d like to do the same - didn’t realise the default was to nofollow.

    Do you guys actually check and leave more comments on sites that dofollow?

  8. #3

    Comment by Mosey on 5 March 2007:

    Interesting idea :) Alas, because I don’t actually have a site with this alias, I shalt continue to comment on your posts on a strictly ‘I’m dead interested’ basis :)

  9. #2

    Comment by Ajay on 5 March 2007:

    Like Alpesh I too am using DoFollow. I want to give my Commenters Sites some PR love.

  10. #1

    Comment by Alpesh Nakar on 5 March 2007:

    Hi Everton,
    Thanks for the updates. I am using do follow plugin and this is a good incentive for comments to flow in.
    Cheers!
    Alpesh

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