Engage in the Conversation general

Comments are essential to any successful blog. Without comments, blogs tend to fall flat for a number of reasons including: no feedback from readers, no one to extend the discussion started in the blog post, or a depressed blog owner who sees he/she has nothing to moderate when he/she logs into their admin panel and decides to just delete the whole blog. But in all honestly, comments truly are the bread and butter to any successful blog. You can write as much quality content if you want, but if it appears it is going unnoticed, your motivation to continue writing is slowly going to go out the window.

You can write as much quality content if you want, but if it appears it is going unnoticed, your motivation to continue writing is slowly going to go out the window.

For any blog, writing isn’t generally the problem (otherwise you wouldn’t stay around for long anyways) - but getting the public response is. One of the main things I always struggled with back when I was with Devlounge was the lack of comments. I was constantly putting out new pieces, some good and some not, but the response was just never there. It was disappointing to say the least. And of course I would always get the occasional assholes who would leave a “that doesn’t make any sense” or “worst article I’ve ever read”. That’s not the kind of feedback anyone is looking for. If you’re going to critique something, at least say what can be improved. Regardless, I picked up a few tips over the past year which I should have down more utilizing of in the Devlounge days.

Getting a greater response:

Write often
First things first when it comes to gathering quality conversation from your visitors. Write often. A stale blog (as this one was over the past week) is never going to do anyone any good when it comes to getting response from your visitors. The more new content, the higher the influx of visitors and readers are going to be, regardless of how established or unestablished the site is. Readers could follow a direct link in to another post, only to read some previous posts, creating more opportunities for commenting.

Don’t just write, write controversial
It’s always good when you’re willing to take a “blogging risk”. I previously called out 9rules on a pretty public stage. Controversial and opinionated pieces tend to draw a lot of response, especially depending on what the topic was and how controversial / opinionated you got in your post. Even if people don’t agree with you, it can lead to a comment conversation that can last quite a while, and if both parties act respectfully and have a mature conversation at the topic at hand, that commenter is very likely to stay around and stay active because of the back and forth banter from another post.

Engage Yourself
There’s no better way to invite comments to your blog than being active yourself on other blogs. For one, most blog owners like to see where their audience is coming from. If you leave a link, they’ll check it out. If they find something good, that myspace “comment back!” rules will usually come into effect and you’ll find yourself with a return comment from a site you recently commented on. It all works in one big circle. It’s important to also be active on a wide variety of sites, not just ones in the same genre as your own. Doing so will expand your own audience, which is never a bad thing. Also, forget about the whole page rank bullshit as well. It doesn’t matter whether your commenting on a PR1 site or a PR6 - hit them all with valid comments that have meaning to them and it will help regardless of the pagerank.

Share the recent
Sharing your recent comments also seems to be key. Why? Even those little comment blurbs can be enough to entice new visitors to check out what that person had to say, possibly leading to their own response. Plus displaying recent comments will demonstrate that their is indeed active conversation going on across your blog. This is not a very hard thing to do either, as any widgetized wordpress theme will let you add a recent comment widget to your blog simply by dragging and dropping. And if your theme isn’t widgetized, there are a number of plugins which can take care of recent comments for you. Here at DUI, each week I’m doing a “comment crunch”, where I select the best responses to each [recent] post create its own post for them. This will do two things - highlight the comment itself and the article, creating double exposure and hopefully engaging more response from the audience.

Now go out there and get engage the conversation.