I 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 of the changes I made as quite frankly, it’s stunned me and I think it warrants its own post rather than a comment.

One of the changes I made to try and encourage more comments was to add my Comments Feed to the list of feeds that are displayed when a user clicks on the RSS link in the browser (pictured above), which WordPress doesn’t do automatically. Prior to making this change I had about 5 subscribers to my comments feed, of which 3 were me. Since making this change yesterday my the number of subscribers to my comment feed jumped to 80 overnight.

The chart below shows this amazing increase:

(Update: It jumped another 94 yesterday.  I need to find a way to weave it into my template, but you can see the current count here.)

I’m still stunned by this increase as it was totally unexpected. I’m kicking myself now as I’m sure that if I’d made this change a few months or even a few years ago (yes, I’ve been blogging that long) I would have saved some of the thousands of people who have visited my blog over this period and have churned, by increasing their involvement in my blog by making sure that they saw all the comments as well.

It probably would have also led to my blog receiving more comments and traffic by pulling readers back to the site more often. I’ve always wondered how some sites have managed to get so many users subscribed to their comments feed - now I know how! I can’t wait to see how high my comments feed subscription count goes over the next couple of days, and whether my comment count and traffic will benefit. I’m pretty sure that they will.

To make the change is simple. 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.

Another quick tip which I’m suprised more blogs don’t do is add the manual subscribe to options option from the great Subscribe To Comments Plugin. This allows users to get comment updates without having to post a comment. To do this all you have to add is the following to your theme:
<?php if(function_exists('show_manual_subscription_form')) show_manual_subscription_form(); ?>

I wish more blogs did this as there are many times when I don’t want to comment on a post until I see what other people have to say.

If you implement any of these changea and see similar increases in the number of subscribers to your comments feed or the number of comments you receive, then please share your numbers in a comment below.