Dealing with Comments
by Sam Cherry 3 years, 10 months ago
Invite readers to comment. Do not just assume that if an article is interesting and useful, readers will want to comment. Instead, at the end of every post express readers your appreciation of their feedback and invite them to leave a comment.
Quick approval. Ideally, readers love to see their comments appear instantly in the thread to keep the conversation live. So don’t deprive them of that opportunity, moderate and approve good comments as as soon as possible.
Reply to comments. If the comment is more than just plain “download call recorder”, especially if it addresses issues raised in your post or asks you a question - reply to it as quickly as possible.
Reward best commenters. You can either do the best comments review and publish it as a regular entry on the home page linking out to the original post or, alternatively, just edit the post itself and include quotes from best commenters at the bottom. Either way, express your appreciation of the smartest and most prolific contributers.
Useful Plugins
CommentLuv is a WordPress plugin, which fetches the title of the commenter’s latest post and displays it just below the comment he/she made on your blog. It’s a great way to show appreciation for the commenters contribution to your blog and stimulate them to leave further comments.
Dofollow plugin
I strongly recommend installing this plugin and then submitting your blog to a dofollow blog search engines and networks. This may notably improve your blog’s popularity and bring a lot of new visitors to your site, some of which will become your permanent readership and thus a potential source of your income.
BT Active Discussions plugin
This is another great pluing to show your readers which posts on your blog receive most comments and thus get more people involved into the most interesting discussions.
Blog commenting DON’Ts
- Do no comment just to get a link. Leave a comment only if you have something valuable to add.
- Don’t leave approving comments like “Great post, thanks for sharing!”. Those are often treated as spam and have no chance of being published.
- Don’t place a link to your site within a comment, unless the link is an essential part of a long and informative comment. And even then I would recommend that, as the normal practise is to let your name (or name + keyword) be the link.