Shaun Low

In today’s blog world I don’t see enough discussion among blogs between the blog owner and his or her readers. The idea behind blogging is to have someone read your content and hopefully interact with your website and contribute to your discussion. Here are a few incentives on why you should respond to your readers thoughts:

1 ) Nobdody likes talking to themselves. The definition of communication:

Communication is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. Communication requires that all parties understand a common language that is exchanged.

Notice the word “exchanged” is italicized. If your readers are leaving comments and there is no exchange of words and ideas between both parties (the blogger and the commentator), your commentators will be disinclined to engage in more discussion in the future.

2 ) Comments are the readers way of showing appreciation towards your article. If they appreciate your article and take the time to contribute to your blog by leaving a comment the least you can do is respond to their comment.

3 ) Responding to all of your comments will help you learn from your readers. The act of responding to your comments will force you to actually “read” the comment. Believe me you will learn a lot from your commentators, often times your readers will make suggestions to your article including:

-Valuable points you missed when writing your post.

-Content you didn’t need to include in the post.

-Spelling and grammar mistakes.

-Your readers will often times keep you informed of other relevant topcis with possibly a link to where you can learn more.

4 ) Blogging is meant to be established and written on a personal level. Blogging is a tool which connects the blogger with his or her readers and there is no better way to accomplish this by engaging in discussion via the comments section.

5 ) Just by responding to the comments you help generate even more discussion. The more talking (commenting) on your blog the more others will want to join in on the discussion and leave their two cents. If there is dead silence in your blog it is difficult for some people to spark the discussion by leaving one of the first comments.

6 ) Helps the blogger get to know his or her readers. Two way commenting is similar to a conversation on instant messaging like MSN or Yahoo, except it’s not really “instant”. You can really tell the personality of anyone just by talking to them via instant messaging, I think it’s safe to say the same thing applies when commenting back and forth.

7 ) Questions, comments, and concerns from your readers are one of the best ways to generate ideas for new posts. By responding to your comments you get an idea of what topics your readers need to be filled in on. If the same questions are being asked over and over again you will eventually pick up on this and hopefully answer all of their questions in a single post. This will save you time responding to comments and will give your readers the most important thing you can give, knowledge they actually require.

8 ) Forces the blogger to analyze the comments. If you “study” your comments you will notice which style of posts generate the most discussion. Use this to maximize your blog growth by publishing more articles similar to the ones that had a lot of comments left on. You can really tell the success of a blog just from the amount of valuable comments left on the site.

9 ) The sign of a healthy blog is one that has a healthy relationship with his readers. This applies to:

-Answering e-mails inquiries.

-Helping other bloggers with anything related to the topic you write about.

-Replying to comments.

10 ) Encourages your readers to come back and comment more. If you are keeping updated with not only publishing new articles but keeping in touch with your readers you will notice an increase in traffic, comments, and return visitors. It’s a win win situation for everyone

When should I respond to comments?

-When the reader asks a question.  Again this goes back to the point that your blog is a “communication tool” and should be used as one accordingly. Your readers will often times ask questions using your comments section either about something you just published or it could even be a more general question that is a bit off topic. Whatever the case is make sure you asnwer these valuable questions.

-When the reader leaves a negative comment. I never delete any negative comments on my blog because these comments encourage people with different opinions to discuss their side of the article. Turn this negative comment around and use it to generate more discussion on your blog. If a reader decides that he or she disagrees with what you said and happens to include some profanity in their response, don’t forget you are the author of the blog and you can always edit the comment. Simply delete the profanity and still continue to have the comment published live for your readers to see.

-If your reader offers a suggestion. I love getting suggestions and ideas from my readers. I am far from a professional and I most definitly don’t pretend to be one. Just as my readers are learning so am I. Take the time to respond to suggestions and further more, take their suggestions into consideration. What I mean by this is to not only aknowlege their suggestion but to follow up on whatever it is they said. If they linked to an article with more information on what you just wrote about then read it!

Should I respond via e-mail or the comments section?

There is no real significance in the way you respond to your comments be it via e-mail or the comments section. The only advantage of responding to comments via e-mail is that it is more personal because your response is delivered directly to their inbox. The disadvantage of this is that the rest of your readers don’t get to see your response.

I would however, recommend e-mailing your response and leaving your response in the comments section to any comments which you feel are important to you.

How do I increase comments on my website?

1) Make it easy to comment on your website. Have a link guiding your readers to the comment section clearly visible. Also having a nice big easy to find comment field will help.

2) Don’t force your readers to login and register before they comment. This is extremely obvious that you will get a huge decrease in comments.

3) Don’t have any complicated spam checking devices on your site. Asking a simple calculation of (2 +2) or something similar to that is fine.

4) Ask your readers a question at the end of a post. I did this when I first started blogging and I noticed a huge increase in comments. This is a simple yet highly effective way of increasing comments.

5) Be controversial. State in your post your side of the story and nothing more. Don’t “Sit on the fence” when it comes to your opion, be blunt, pick a side, and defend it to the death. This will give you a strong voice in the blogging world.

Plugins, plugins and more plugins! (all comment related plugins)

1 ) Show Top Commentators:

Encourage more discussion from your readers, by displaying their names (linked to their website if desired) and number of comments they have made recently to your sidebar.

Download here.

2 ) Brans Threaded Comments: This plugin adds a ‘Reply to this comment’ link to every comment. When you use the reply link, your comment is placed directly under the comment you replied to.

Download here.

3 ) Subscribe To Comments:

Subscribe to Comments 2.1 is a plugin that allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there for the simple reason that it helps foster a community around your blog by encouraging commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.

Download here.

4 ) Comment Relish:

Comment relish is a Wordpress plugin developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your website who have never commented before. The message dispatched to the user is defined within the plugin’s preferences.

Download here.

5 ) Link Love: This plugin turns off nofollow for all commenters who have made at least 10 comments. The number of comments is configurable by changing a variable in the plugin.

Download here.

Problogger has complied a great list of Comment Managment Plugins which all assist in managing your comments and responding to your readers. Check out the list for more tips on responding to comments on your blog.

How to respond to several comments at once

This is a simple tactic I’ve been using on my blog lately. This allows me to reply to as many comments as I want in one comment. All you have to do is click “reply to this comment” and use an “@” sign followed by the persons name to direct your attention to whoever you are talking to. It’s somewhat hard to explain in plain text so this screen shot will explain a lot better than me rambling on:

Should I have comment moderation on?

Personally I would say no. Many of the mainstream bloggers out there don’t have this feature turned on for a few reasons.

-Nobody wants to wait to have their comment published live. Insant gratification is what many of your readers are seeking.

-This will only decrease the amount of comments if anything. I can’t see having this feature turned on increasing the amount of comments in any way.

-Blogging and the internet world moves at a very fast pace. Information becomes old very quickly so it is probably best to have your comments being published instantly.

-Spam and profanity don’t occur too often. I haven’t had to delete a single comment due to spam or profanity. All of my spam comments are caught by the Akismet plugin and all of my readers have left respectable comments which were appropriate for the public to read.

You don’t have to be waiting beside your computer ready to respond to all of your comments. Heck you don’t even have to respond to “all” of your comments at all. Just show some respect towards your readers and try to respond to some of your comments every once and a while. I try to respond to all of my comments because that’s the least I can do to show my appreciation for my readers.

About The Author

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 12:37 am and is filed under The Net. 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.