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!
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Comment by Everton on 6 March 2007:
It’s much nicer as a publisher when readers talk back - it keeps you going when you’re not in the mood to post
I haven’t found a plugin that works works with my paged comments. What I have been considering is adding a ‘quote’ option and an optiion that would allow commenters to edit their comments. I’ve ditched these in the past as they seemed a luxury and nobody was using them.
Would anyone find it useful if I added these or are you happy just using blockquotes?
Comment by Thilak on 6 March 2007:
One more tip, Since this is a place for great discussions to happen, have you considered using Nested Comments ?
Comment by Thilak on 6 March 2007:
Great Research. Comments are the currency of blogs, maybe I should take your lead
Pingback by Manage Your Blog Comments Using RSS - Investor Trip on 6 March 2007:
[...] to Connected Internet’s recent post on increasing blog comments, I added a site-wide Comments RSS feed for my RSS/Atom users. Now, when you leave a comment on my [...]
Pingback by Increasing The Number Of Comments On Your Blog - Part II | Connected Internet on 6 March 2007:
[...] was pleased to see that my post yesterday about increasing the number of comments on your blog generated a nice healthy discussion. I’ve decided to post some feedback on the success of one [...]
Comment by Everton on 5 March 2007:
Nope, it’s always been there
Comment by Dan and Jennifer on 5 March 2007:
Yeah, I think that’s a new feature in the plugin - I downloaded it about 2 weeks ago and remember seeing something about that as a “this just in - brand new” feature.
Didn’t expect it when i was going to download the plugin, but it’s definitely a cool feature.
On that topic - an interesting issue that can come from using that plugin is possible spam accusations. Yes, people do get a direct link in each email so they can unsubscribe, which is great. But I was reading something on Jeff Kee’s blog about this a few days ago - where someone had signed up to comments with an email of abuse@google.com or something like that.
http://blog.jeffkee.com/2007/02/12/a-new-scam-attempting-to-black-list-you-by-google/
Kinda silly really, but could be worth it to go through the “subscribed” tab in the WP manage tool now and then to prune the obviously bogus stuff.
Have an awesome day!
Dan
Comment by Everton on 5 March 2007:
In addition to this I’ve noticed that even the people who use this plugin don’t use the manual subscribe option that allows users to subscribe to comments without having to comment.
Comment by Everton on 5 March 2007:
I’ve gone for the semilogic plugin as I trust their work more. I’m going to post all the plugins I’m using tomorrow to see if you guys have any others to recommend, or so you can download some of mine
Comment by Dan and Jennifer on 5 March 2007:
Oh, I forgot a very obvious one - the “subscribe to comments” plugin. Everton already has this, but many people don’t.
That has done wonders for us as far as getting people to come back and leave MORE comments on a discussion after someone else comments. People tend to want to know what was said after they left their own comment.
We finally installed that since I noticed that I tend to check that “subscribe me to comments” box when I leave a comment somewhere, and Jennifer does the same. Well, lots of folks do.
Have an awesome day!
Dan