Added My First Plugin For A Long Time: Comment Relish
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?
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Comment by Chris on 9 May 2007:
I was actually surprised aswell with all the comments, i was beginning to wonder if the feedburner was a jpg! But in all seriousness i’ve posted a few comments usually one to every 2 or 3 posts. I love your blog and i read it daily but sometimes i feel the posts stop abruptly like it seems theres more to your story but you just don’t have time to fully write it. One post i felt this in was the yahoo/msn merger a couple of days ago as i didn’t know about it i was extremely interested and then had to leave in a flash to find some more info!
Im in no way flaming your blog as i’ve mentioned above i love it greatly just my opinion of it. If you got some time i just finished making my new site check it out! (plug)
Comment by Robert Irizarry on 9 May 2007:
I’ve been looking at the Comment Relish plugin as well. I think it’s a great idea - I just need to do some testing since I have a few comment related plugins already in use.
I’ve been using the WWSGD plugin which allows you to set a message for new visitors. I only started it with my switch to Wordpress in April so it might be a bit early to tell. However, I can’t say that I’ve seen any great improvement for the moment.
Comment by Ajay on 9 May 2007:
Hey Ditto here. I alos added the same plug-in today. Infact I ma installing it now.
Comment by Brown Baron on 9 May 2007:
Comment relish is a great plugin. I discovered this plugin when Thilak mentioned it a while back on his blog.
Comment by Everton on 9 May 2007:
@chris
Thanks that is useful feedback. I agree that many times I could write more in-depth posts. The problem I have is I’m still not sure how much info people want - do they want a full 1000 word review or a quick post that gives them a heads up? I also have to admit that sometimes I probably write shorter posts than I want to because I am pushed for time.
One area I know that is holding my site back is I try not to post during the day i.e. when I’m at work. Because of this, I often don’t get the breaking news because it has already been picked up by a lot of sites, so I don’t bother posting about it all. I also tend to post in advance the day before, which decreases the freshness of news.
This was the case with the yahoo/microsoft rumours - by the time I’d got around to doing a post the story was already about 2 days old so I assumed everyone had seen it. I think what I will do is start posting the same day rather than a day in advance as this should increase the freshness of my posts, which will encourage me to say more about breaking news.
Comment by Sharon from Zimbabwe on 9 May 2007:
I am one of the lurkers you are talking about. Not sure why i dont comment even thgough i visit daily. One blog which get a lot of comments is john chow’s blog and the top comentors are highly visible and he even went on to expalsin in one of his post how to do it better for seo.From your Everton it seems only one is doing it for SEO.
To my suprise i also post a lot on his blog. Its become more like a cult. i think you may need to try that. To promote top comentors very visible and maybe ask us for a response. i was reading coppyblogger and he has a few tips he wrote on closing you blog. I actually have a question for you. i will pm you through the forum. Hope you dont mind
Comment by Arpit Jacob on 9 May 2007:
Hey there This a lurker unlurking. love your blog, while comment relish is a great plugin I find sending mails with a personal touch receives more responses. So if I see first time commentors I personally mail and thank them.
Comment by Dan and Jennifer on 9 May 2007:
Hey Everton,
I have a confession to make, and it’s going to shock you. Really, it will. Ok, here it is: “I’m not much of a lurker.”
Seriously, thanks so much for mentioning this plugin, it’s awesome. I saw this happen on a friend’s site a few days ago when I left a comment, but didn’t know what plugin it was and haven’t heard back from her yet.
So, impeccable timing.
Have an awesome day!
Dan
Comment by Everton on 9 May 2007:
One thing I am going to do tomorrow is make the recent comments section and the top commentors more prominent. At the moment I’m pushing the top posts to try push my top posts which never really change, which are designed to try and entice new readers into reading more. I think what I’m going to do is change the site design to try and make it more useful for lurkers.
This won’t solve the problem of getting feed lurkers to comment, although I read something today that I’m going to test out tomorrow.
Comment by Dan and Jennifer on 10 May 2007:
This plugin automatically ignores anyone who’s previously left a comment on your blog.
Any idea off hand how to make it NOT ignore them and still send these good people your initial email?
Have an awesome day!
Dan
Comment by Dennis Bjørn Petersen on 11 May 2007:
A really nice plugin. I’ve been sending a personal email to the few that commented on my blog, but this will send an email to all those that just drop by for a Joost invitation.
I really like the idea of Top Commentators. As long as we say something clever its good
Comment by Former Fat Guy on 26 May 2007:
I read the snippet of this post in your archives I think and the first thing I thought of before I “continued reading” was that I could not only thank them for the comment, but invite them to subscribe to the newsletter AND make them aware of the community / forum on my blog.
Then I continued to read the entry and found that we were thinking along the same lines