I’ve been using WordPress for about a year now, and over that time I must have tried out hundreds of plugins. I haven’t added one for a while, so it was nice finding a new one to try out.

Comment Relish is a new WordPress plugin that sends a nice email message to users when they’ve left their first comment. I think this is a nice touch and could help to capture new regular readers, who will leave more comments, which will hopefully encourage other lurkers to leave comments and so on.

Trying to get my lurkers i.e. users who regularly read my posts and don’t leave a comment, is one problem I really want to crack. Seeing how many comments were left yesterday from readers asking for Joost invites made me realise just how many lurkers I have, as the post hasn’t even been indexed by Google yet, yet it has received a record number of comments in just over 24 hours.

Another problem I’m trying to solve is getting more visitors from search engines to subscribe before leaving. This site regularly gets over 6K unique visitors per day, and Google Analytics says that 87% of these are new visitors. If I could get even just 1% of these readers to subscribe to my feed before leaving then I would be adding a tad over 1,500 new subscribers a month. When you consider that my feed count averages around 1,400 to 1,500, you can see that I’m not doing a good job of capturing these visitors.

What things have you done to try and encourage new visitors to subscribe? I’ve noticed that some of you use the WordPress plugin that displays a custom message to new visitors encouraging them to subscribe. What kind of results have you seen - does it work?