Daily: February 8, 2012

A blog is a valuable asset to any business. Your blog gives you the opportunity to establish yourself or your company as an industry leader, gives you a platform to network with your industry peers, and allows you to generate buzz in social media.

If you can get comments on your blog, you’ll increase both your SEO benefits and your status as an industry leader. Each new comment adds more valuable content on that post, so yes, you can start ranking for different variations of keywords that are naturally mentioned in your comments. Also, the more comments you have, the more clout you appear to have, because people are interested enough in what you have to say to bother commenting.

Do you want to increase the number of comments on your blog? You can increase the participation levels on your blog by following the ways listed below:

 1. End With A Question

Sometimes readers don’t know what to comment about. Posting a question about your post will give them an anchor point to what they can talk about. Intuitively speaking, we should place that question right at the end of the post. If your reader has read from the beginning to the end and got to that point, chances are that he or she is interested in what you’ve written. The reader will be pretty motivated to answer your question.

One thing to note is that your question should be as general as possible, unless you want to direct the discussion to a specific point. A general question allows for more freedom in their comments, so that your readers don’t feel constrained and choose not to comment in the end.

2. Remove blog comments CAPTCHA

Make it easy to comment. the only thing makes me not comment, even on posts that are worth commenting on, is blogs with complicated commenting process. Remove the CAPTCHA, never ask for login. Don’t customize too much the blog comments section.

3. Comment on other blogs

And I am not talking about commenting on problogger or copyblogger. Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. Comment on blogs with traffic similar to your blog and ask the other blogger comment on your blog. This is a great way to generate initial comments on new blogs plus you would get immediate feedback.

4. Interact with comments on your blog

If someone leaves a comment on your blog, ensure that you interact with them. It is understandable that this could get harder as your blog grows but try to devote sometime during the day to show your readers that their comments are valued. Over time, you will notice that loyal visitors will answer questions and create a community too.

5. Reward Your Commenters

You can increase comments by providing incentives to those who do comment.  You can give your readers some page rank by providing ‘dofollow’ links on your comments.  You can advertise their most recent articles from their blogs with the WordPress CommentLuv plugin.  And you can promote their twitter status with WP Twitttip  ID plugin for WordPress.

6. Ask for Feedback on Social Media Channels

Instead of just tweeting and Facebook sharing your article with the typical format of “Title – Link, ” ask for feedback. “Title – Link – Would love your thoughts, please comment” is a type of tweet or update that once again shows that you care about what your audience thinks, rather than just promoting your own point of view.