Recently Patsi and I held a blogging Q&A session for our customers and clients. Over the next week or so we'll post some of the questions our clients asked along with our responses. The first question, and one we get a lot is about commenting.
Q: How do you encourage people to comment?
A: here are a number of ways to handle comments and to get people to comment. The most direct way to get people to comment is to be a little bit provocative or passionate in your blog post and what you are writing and the other is to be very specific. Add at the end of your post: "Let me know what you think, click on the comment link and leave your comment."
Sometimes you really have to spell it out, a lot of people may not be that familiar with blogs or maybe they don't know that they can comment, maybe they don't understand what that comment link is for.
So it does not hurt at all to say: "Click on the comment link and let me know your opinion, etc."
Some blogs don't lend themselves to have a lot of comments and some blogs do and you can guess which blogs get the most amount of comments -- those will be the political blogs, the religious blogs, and, perhaps, the porno blogs. But if you are a coach and you are writing about some improvement or some development, you'd have to go on to the edge to get people to participate and you can do that or not, but don't judge your blog on the amount of comments.
It may be a compliment when a reader comments, but it doesn't mean that your blog is any less because you don't have commenters.
And the other thing is, if people are sending you emails in response, that's also a good indication that people are paying attention. You can always turn those emails, if they contain some substantive content, turn them into new blog posts.
So, say you have a blog post on a certain subject and somebody sent you an email, you can reply to their email saying, "you know, this is really great, would you mind if I use your comment in my next blog post. I will put a link to your blog or your website." And most of the time, unless it's totally private and personal, people will say, "oh yeah, go ahead."
Note that when you get a comment you will get a notice from TypePad (if you're using Typepad) letting you know that somebody has responded to a post. You get the comment right inside the email they send to you; you click on that and it will take you right to your blog to where the comment is posted. You then have a couple of ways you can respond. You can write another comment to their comment on your blog, or you can post a new article about the comment, or you can email back to that person privately. We recommend responding to them no matter what because you want to encourage the reader and let them know you appreciate their participation.
If you have other ideas for soliciting comments, please use the comment link below to add your suggestions. Thanks!
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