Written on September 23rd, 2004 at 07:09 pm by Darren Rowse
Blog Tips - Getting Comments
What is your experience with Blog Comments? Do you use them? How do they enhance or hinder your blogging experience? How do you suggest bloggers starting out approach the issue?
One of our citywide papers has a section on a Thursday dedicated to Media and Technology. One of the writers there has started his own blog - The Bleeding Edge. Its got some good posts on it and as with most new blogs its being updated many times per day.
Today they wrote a post about the lack of comments on their blog. As they put it, its a bit of a ‘No Comment Zone’. I decided to leave my thoughts and then after rambling on a bit decided to add them to my Blog Tip Collection.
Here is what I wrote…
No comments eh…. I remember that problem well. Can I make a few observations?
1. Your site is rather difficult to leave a comment on. Its just taken me 5 minutes to go through the process of registering, then finding I couldn’t have a space in my login name, re-registering, waiting for the email with my password, finding the post I wanted to comment on again, then after clicking ‘comments’ having to click another ‘post comments’ button. Now unless I really wanted to leave a comment and let you know that I’m enjoying your blog I would have given up on leaving my two cents worth long ago. The average person stays on a blog for less than 2 minutes (we found it was 96 seconds in this informal study). So if you want them to interact with you its got to be easy to do. Of course with ‘easy’ comes issues of spam comments - but I’d rather delete a few comments than not have any. I find sites that make people register to leave a comment generally don’t get as many unless their content is very controversial or they get a lot of traffic.
2. Different Content = Different Comment Levels - I’ve noticed in my own blogs that one gets a lot of comments (an average of 5 per post) and the other gets virtually none (1 comment for every 10 or so posts) despite it getting more traffic. Why? The nature of the content is different and will illicit different responses from readers. The one that gets a lot of comments is more personal, occasionally controversial, talks about ‘deeper issues’ and asks readers for input. The other one (with few comments) is technical in nature and gives more information that it asks for.
3. Sometimes it is better not to have comments at all. One of the ways a lot of blog readers gauge the value of a blog is to look at how many comments there are. If you blog says ‘0′ comments under each post its not that inspiring for your readers to want to interact.
4. If you’re interActive your Readers will be - I’ve found more people leave comments when they get a personal email or reply comment that engages with their comment. It gets a little hard when you have thousands of visitors coming to your site a day, but if you’re seen to be interActive then people will interact with you.
5. Give your readers some incentive to leave a comment. Blogs that let their readers make a comment with a link back to their own site give their readers not only a way to interact but also to do a little self promotion. Again this can lead to spam but there are ways around it if you use Moveable Type which has spam blocking features that don’t require registration.
By no means is the above all that can be said about blog comments - you might also want to check out some of my earlier Blog Comments Tips and some other tips on ways of making your blog more interActive. I’d love to get others thoughts on their experience with and tips on getting comments on their blog.
7 Responses to “Blog Tips - Getting Comments”
LivingRoom >> A space for Life
January 1st, 2005 11:36 pm
Blog Tip 34 - Getting Comments
What is your experience with Blog Comments? Do you use them? How do they enhance or hinder your blogging experience? How do you suggest bloggers starting out approach the issue?… The remainder of this blog tip has been relocated to…
BobbyMasteria
March 12th, 2005 3:22 pm
I’m about to implement 2 feeds for both comments combined to trackbacks.
One global feed that will just say there’s one more comment or trackback on this entry.
And another per entry feed that will do the same but including the comments’ and trackbacks’ content.
It will also notify the subscriber when it’s time to unsubscribe (when submissions are closed).
Eric Mack
April 13th, 2005 5:00 pm
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More on Writing Content for your Blog: enternetusers Blog Tips
February 21st, surf zone.12:06 am
[…] InterActive Blogging - While occasionally I come across a blogger that doesn’t want too much interaction with their readers I get a lot of questions from bloggers asking how to get MORE interaction - particularly around how to have a more interActive comments section. While a major impact upon comments is the number of visitors you have on your blog there are definitely strategies for getting more comments (also check out this post on The Secret to InterActive Blogging). The main tip I’d give on this is to be interActive with the readers you have. Start with what you’ve got and build from there rather than complaining about what you don’t yet have. […]
David Ward
February 21st, surf zone.6:00 pm
I’ve taken your advice and turned off the required registration for comments. I hope this will help lead to an increase in comments.
Comment Baiting: The Simplest Approach | blogHelper
July 27th, surf zone.5:58 am
[…] Update: enternetusers already has a useful post on getting comments, which while written two years back, is still as relevant today. +Del.icio.us +Furl It +Spurl +Tag!RawSugar +My Web […]
Graphicary
June 9th, 2007 8:16 am
Great post with some good ideas. I’ll be reading the other two posts you linked to also. I always find good info here but, until recently, I had no blog so I couldn’t exactly put any of it to use.
Anyway, nice job!
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