Of course you know who reads your blog - it’s:

• 22 people in Google Reader,
• 32 people using Firefox Live Bookmarks,
• 90 people on Technorati,
• and another 30 get it delivered on Feedburner email….

I’ll ask the question again… Do you know WHO reads your blog?
The answer is probably no, unless they comment regularly.

I discussed this recently on one of my blogs, as I was receiving no comments (but still had lots of readers!), and wanted to see who was really out there. I certainly got a few surprises!

If you’re not writing for your readers, who are you writing for? Yourself? I know blogging is kind of therapeutic for many of us (and anger management for others maybe?), but surely you’d like to get a bit of feedback on what you’re writing? So what is going to make people comment?

Making it Easy

I did a little digging on several of my blogs and suddenly realised, the option “Users must be registered to comment” was set in Wordpress. This certainly doesn’t encourage people to comment - I probably wouldn’t bother either! So I turned this off.

Make it’s easy for them to subscribe to your feed, otherwise they won’t know you’ve updated your blog, how can they comment if they don’t think there’s anything new there? I use FeedBurner for my feed, and FeedBurner FeedSmith to make it really easy for anyone and everyone to subscribe for my updates.

Make sure you’ve got a comment plugin that allows people to subscribe to comments on on your blog posts, and they’ll keep coming back if they get a dialogue going.

If they comment, make sure you send a follow up mail to them - thanking them and telling them where they can find your feed - Gobala discussed the plugin I use; Comment Relish quite recently.

Making it Worthwhile

It’s that age old “What’s in it for me?” discussion really. You don’t get something for nothing in life and blog readers feel the same, if they make the effort to comment - they expect something in return.

I’m a member of the do follow community, if a blogger comments on my blog (and it’s not spam or in breach of my comment policy) then I’ll link back to their blog with a link that the search engines will take notice off (note Wordpress doesn’t support this out of the box - DoFollow plugin takes care of this for me!).

Going forward (and I have yet to implement this), I plan to reward top commenting readers with a link in the sidebar on every page - the top X many per month will achieve this - providing they comment regularly!

In Summary

• Make it easy for people to comment!
• Make it worthwhile for them to comment!
• Know your readers, they’re the people that will make your blog grow!

What do you do to motivate your readers to comment?

Read it at the source

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 12:05 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.