Comments are valuable, if you know how it works and how to make an effective use for it. Valuable comments can generate qualified visitors, leads & even revenue for you. As Neil Patel, from QuickSprout generated $25,000 from 249 comments in October 2014 alone.
For a blogger it is really disappointing and it feels his heart broken if someone doesn’t leave a comment on his post or articles, as you spend several hours on researching your contents and trying to publish not only the best you can but also the best on the internet. You wait for your readers to read your article and leave a comment but at the end of the day when you don’t find one, its the most painful and sad thing to happen for a blogger like you.
I know it hurts alot and I have been through this pain, that’s why I have written this in-depth article to guide you into hacking your comment and turning your readers to comment on your post.
Comment may not be very perspective from the view point of SEO or a good metric to measure, but it has a very physic reaction to your readers. Even if your article is a great piece without any comment, the chances are that most of the readers will leave the post or won’t find it authentic enough for them.
Hacking into Comments
Hacking comments doesn’t only means to apply that tactics to influence your readers to make them comment on the articles on your blog. Many bloggers had come up with the idea that asking a question at the end of the post or putting a video in the post turn readers to comment in your blog. Thats true but only the half.
I did a research recently with the my blogs and other several blogs and came up with this list of ways that can bump up your blogs comment.
So lets explore the 10 ways to hack into comments and make your readers comment on it.
1. Let them Comment
I’m not asking you to restrict your readers into your Kingdom of comments or make a hard and fast rule to let a reader comment. I’s just asking are you letting your readers comment on your blog post, in the ease they want or they desire. In the past I was a great fan and really loved the disqus wordpress comment plugin, It was free and it did what i wish a good comment plugin to do.
I loved all of its features, it looks good, it fit to the media sizes and my blogs color & has the option of moderating and managing the functions. But there was something that triggered the wrong canon.
Gary Korisko from rebootauthentic did a research on his blog using the normal comment system and the Disqus comment system and has received 381 comments so far while writing this post.
To his research he found that many of his readers were no able to comment as they no longer remember the password of their disqus login, or don’t want their social profiles to come up while they comment using the social login feature or can’t multiple identities.
I even felt that as I use my blogs name and my name to comment on the post and replies and for me too it was a hassle to manage different identities. It just didn’t end there for me, I got emails from my readers that the comment plugin was not even able to load completely on their slow networks and for others it made my website load slow.
So i took back my disqus done as i want my readers happy with my blog rather putting my expectations before. Wait what about the spam, as we all know wordpress gets a hell of spam rain every day.
Warning! Indicates a warning that might need attention.
2. Do you Teach or Ask?
Comments just doesn’t comes from what you write, it also depends on how you write. Do you write to Teach someone for the skills you posses or just to ask them. Brian Dean received 240 comments on his post content strategy.
Well he won’t be able to achieve that great result if he would ask rather providing others, and as a result he was able to generate 240 comments on his article.
Readers always appreciate to the ones that teaches them the new things and in the way they thanks them by commenting or by clearing their doubts.
Here’s how Jeff Going taught 3 things about good book cover design that most people don’t know, and he was able to achieve great conversation on his article. This was definitely due to the reason of teach or ask, where he taught the missing chains of good book cover designs who lacks that chain.
3. Use attention-grabbing headlines.
Its not the article you wrote that grabs the attention of a potential reader or the in-depth value it contains. Most of the copywriters will say that its the headlines that play the major roles. David ogilvy said that on the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.
I make use of attention grabbing headlines, see how I make use of “Hacking in Comments” The work hacking is an attention grabbing word.
QuickSprout in their definitive guide to copywriting mentioned the importance of headlines and came up with the 4U’s.
Your headline should be unique.
Your headline should be ultra-specific.
Your headline should convey a sense of urgency.
Your headline should be useful.
In a research done by Kissmetrics on the Headline Psychology, they came up with the 8 great tricks to attract user attention. And to the surprise it had worked very well and has been adopted by several bloggers.
The 8 tricks are as under:
Negativity
Surprise
Curiosity
Questions
Numbers
Specificity
Audience preference
How to
You may have come across those 8’s in several blogs as “How to make a website”, ” 12 ways to increase your readers” or ” Your blog will spammed if you don’t use this plugins”.
The headline is and will always be the most important element of your post/articles. It’s what prompts your reader to click your link and read your content in the first place where ever they come up with your post, either its on social network or any community forums. According to writtent, 80% of people may read your headline, while only 20% go on to read the entire post or article.
Normal headlines with attention grabbing tends to work much better than any other types of headlines.
4. Immense Value Content or just Lengthy?
The world is changing and so well is the blog and the way its written. Earlier the article used be focused for SEO and was relatively shorter than todays post where a post containing 2000 words is termed as good length post. Measuring the contents value is pretty hard and requires a lot of research and money.
It may not be easy, but you can simply gauge the level of satisfaction your readers derive from reading a post on your site. Satisfying your readers is more likely to get your blog, products, and services recommend to others.
For bloggers the way to give immense vale to their readers is to write in-depth articles that covers everything in that particular topic, and in that way when you readers read your articles they quit their search and simply take the action.
You don’t add value — you simply give it.
Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, gives a lot of value in his Whiteboard Friday videos. In fact, Fishkin receives more comments than other authors and his videos are very popular and has thousands of veiws in youtube.
In depth articles are the the real tools that will help your blog to succeed, In my Guide, “How to start a Blog empire” i have shared a screenshot of my google analytics dashboard where my bounce rate and exit rate has significantly decreased when i opted in for in-depth content.
Here is a screenshot below,
This is easier than it sounds. Ask yourself, “If I read this, would I leave a comment? Does it demand a response?”
If your post is just a brain dump or a rant that isn’t relevant to others, it may not get much of a response. You don’t have to be a professional writer or grammatically flawless to get a comment.
If your post is well-thought and easy to understand, people will respond.
5. Email your Subscribers: The path to Leads.
Derek Halpern, founder of socialtriggers was right: If you’re not building your email list, you’re making a huge mistake. In his post where he mentioned email list is the most important aspect of your online business, especially when when it’s your #1 marketing tool.
Stay focused and Work hard to grow your email list atleast to 5 digits and beyond, because it’s a goldmine that will generate more traffic, sales, and engagement for your online business. The reason for having an email list is because of this technological era, where our concentration breaks and attention gets diverted to new and interesting thing within few minutes.
According to practicalecommerce, they found that Email marketing converts better than social media leads. So it is pretty clear from them that no matters what is your social media followers or fans, having a great email list helps you to have more converts, leads and sales.
6. Shine out in the Crowd
Ever wonder how many blogs are created everyday, it is said that 76% of the blogs runs on wordpress and according to wordpress.com there is about 409 million blogs running and thousands of them are created everyday. So what would make any reader to come visit your blog and stick to it.
You need to be a little controversial. Choose a topic. Pick a side. And stake your claim and that how you can make a reader visit your blog and stick with you.
Controversial contents will definitely make you shine out of the crowd but you need to be careful as if it can make you shine out of crowd, it can also get you weary. It can look like you are just trying to pick a fight.
When you expect people to comment on your blog, you got to have content that catches their attention. Your content has to appeal to them, no matter if it does in a bad way.
Learning to respect negative comments and turning it to make a change in your thought, you make yourself more closer to the way your readers think. Let your reader know your point of view and at times you yourself learn to view things their way. For some negative content is painful but this will only turn your bond stronger and you will gain a loyal readership to your blog.
Its your content that makes you stand out of the crowd, but don’t turn into that old professors who provides valuable information which students dont care. No one carries how strong your word base is and of what vocabulary you make use of in your blog.
Search users want to get relevant information as quickly as possible. Who is going to search for “Skyrocketing blogging traffic methods?” So this headline will not attract search traffic, but if you make it simple enough that even small kid or a non-English person can read & understand it without any husstle, the its definitely going to boost your blog. Some examples are
Top 10 Ways to increase your blogs traffic
Note: From my experience, I can say that in-depth articles following the format of top list perform better in the search engines as well as on social media platforms. Make use of odd numbers and negative words like “Top 15+ secrets” and your chances of generating more targeted traffic and comments will improve.
7. Your blog’s layout might need some revamping.
Your content is interesting, but in a competitive niche. You have to find a way to be unique in your niche in order to stand out. People and mostly new bloggers like it to make their blog too fancy utilising every widgets, banners, ads and optin forms they possibly could in their website.
Most of them make use of a magazine theme or magazine style blog with several colors and widgets, but they don’t realise that the more color and widget they use, it confuses their readers attention, so their bounce rate and exits increase.
You should not clutter your website with too much ads and any such thing that will not leave your visitors with no room to breathe and this will cause them to flee halfway. Comments are a far thing your reader will go to support your blog and if they don’t it will cause you a bounce rate too.
Some point you need to Always remember to encourage blog comments:
Make use of Passive color and Active Color in your blog
Make use of attract link color
Leave white space on your blog to retain readers attention.
Use a good font & size
Make Comment easy for readers.
8. Mirror Transparency? Share your insights, Experience & Much more.
Transparent Bloggers performs well in the long run as their transparency helps them build their own personal brand with the readers and set him as an authoritative blogger. Many bloggers are adapting this idea of getting transparency with their readers and have acheived great results.
I myself is transparent with my readers and share my failures, future and upcoming plans and my income reports. Getting transparent had paid me its results, people started recognising you and your blog and mentions you and your blog/content to others and sometimes even compares with others.
9. Name Dropping
Adam Connell, CEO of Blogging Wizard, really knows how to name-drop in his content and positively make use of name dropping. Including influential name in your niche turns your content into an authoritative blogs. Name-dropping is the practice of mentioning the names of famous expert bloggers in your content.
According to ShareAHolic mentioning name of bloggers in the body of your content tend to perform well than a normal article and prompt user to comment and share the post.
But if you mention an expert who runs a popular and active blog, you’ll not only motivate the person to visit your blog and leave a comment, but you can earn trustworthy links back to your content pages.
10. Contest & Giveaways.
Contest & Giveaways are the modern weapons to attract readers attention and make them participate in your event. You can increase the comments on your blog by hosting a contest and asking your readers to give a feedback through comment.
A contest is simply a competition to find the best among many, it can be anything that you can imagine. You can host a contest to give the winner a $500 Value Blogging course or a premium service or a plugin of yours. A contest & giveaway is usually a great idea, especially when you’re launching a new product or announcing a new event. When you host a contest, you’re simply looking for the top contestants among your readers who can take a extra step to make a difference.
Pat Flynn collected 200k emails with a growth rate of 3,418% from a single contest in just 11 days and thats totally crazy, right!
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11. Get out of your Well
What new bloggers mostly do is they remain within their blog in the hope that their blog will succeed without interacting with other people. Either they are shy to interact with new people or they lack the confidence to present their blog before the world.
So get out of your well and comment on at least 10 other blogs related to your niche or your article that are like yours and already have an audience. Commenting doesn’t only presents your blog to their audience but it represent you as a blogger.
People like be in touch with people who are friendly and are open minded, no body is going to interact with you if you are sticking with yourself and in not friendly with others. Interact with other bloggers from your state, country or your relative niche and let them know your presence in a spam free way.
Leave a thoughtful comment with your blog URL in the comments section. Don’t ask the readers to visit your blog. Just interact and give them a way to find you. If you add to the discussion, people will come find you.
12. Being Hercules on Commentators.
Reduce Barriers to Commenting and don’t be another hercules on your commenters. Though comments are the most spammed area in a blog but its also the discussion generator. I have came across many blogs that say you need to register to comment or fill a stupid captcha to post a comment.Taking that extra step to register in order to comment can be a big turn-off for some readers, so they would rather hold their peace forever. To avoid spam on comments many bloggers put your comment into moderation when you attach a link to it.
So you need to check, Is there anything that might be hindering your readers from posting comments? Do a check yourself and try to post something yourself as a different person. Does it go through smoothly without any restriction and check post in the way? Also, make sure the comment box is easily noticed once you enter the blog as a visitor?
Why this? i saw many blogs try to hide their comment form under a dropdown box thinking its cool, but its not.
13. Join the Queue of your readers in comment
You should respect the one who leaves a feedback about your work on his website,at the very least, thank him or her. If your reader has a question posed to you, all the more you should answer promptly. This will let your reader feel that his or her comments matter, and that he or she isn’t talking to him or herself.
Commenting to your readers promptly impacts your casual readers and helps them to turn into your raving fans. Don’t take too long to respond, the reader might have already forgotten about it and take it that there’s no point commenting on your blog posts.
Delaying in responding to your readers may make them feel an insult, like you don’t value them or they are not important to you. The problem is that the comments are addressed to you, so no one else but you yourself has to reply to it before the reader feels ignored.
Though commenting is not profitable through the view point of seo, but from your readers prospective thats something you should care about. A normal article of yours may not impact any reader but if it has significantly high amount of comments in it, it may sure affect your readers thought. Think of responding to comments as creating a funnel for a new reader to make a impression on him/her, when you spend 2 – 3 minutes to read and respond to comments, the more text you’ll have on your web page the more eye-catching it becomes And the more text you have on your page, the more organic long-tail traffic you’ll ultimately get
You can have a look as Ankit Singla of bloggertipstricks managed to drive 46 comments on his post as he respected the feedback of his readers and responded them where necessary.
14. Commenting on Posts in the Community
If you want people to comment, then set a good example yourself, and you can accomplish this being everywhere. Now you can’t be everywhere physically but you can digitally using pat flynn’s be everywhere method.
Make time to be in your community, the community can be anywhere, it can be in your comments, other blogs comments or a forum. Ensure that you give well thought and your best out comments that relate to the topic instead of simple and boring one-liner generic answers (e.g. “Hey! Great Post!”). Well though conversion comment is especial as when you comment on other blogs and leave a link to your site you want to attract readers and the bloggers to your blog and not let them mistaken your comment as a spam.
Providing valuable comments to a blog article is pretty much like doing an advertisement for your blog without paying a penny. Commenting to blogs and the community is another way to improve traffic to your blog and making a great comment that converts helps your Readers who stumble across those blogs can see what you’ve commented and click on your link to check out yours.
Make use of this tactics while commenting on the community:
Use names of person/author in the start while commenting, it makes it more personal
end it with a question instead of a thanks
make use of conversion tactics while commenting.
15. Kill Friendly Spam
Disqus, Chat Catcher, Twitback, etc all pull several posts from other blogs and website that may or may not be relative to your niche . Clear out the noise and let your readers hear only to your blog and the relative readers.
Disqus is the best example of friendly spam comment plugin, it fetches nearly 6 comments from your blog and another 3 – 6 posts that are visually attractive or viral just to draw your visitors attention and turn them to their readers with just paying you a penny.
16. Write About Failures.
Surprisingly People love observing disasters. There’s nothing more enjoyable than reading about somebody crashing their car and burning down their companies and turning them into ash and you know that they’re okay now so it’s alright to enjoy the story.
“What I learned from Deleting my Entire Blog in a second” is a title sure to gather comments and hit a attention nerve. In past as i had a failure with my new blog and it was terrific for me to realise the mistake i made when it was too late.
Failing is not failure until to turn it to. So either you can learn something from failure or let the failure be above you. When you choose to learn something from your failure and you do and share it with your readers that type of contents are loved by every one as the know exactly what works and what not.
Like me (Niraj), I like to share my failures on first blog that had a terrible fail and the things that i learned from it helps me to build my new blog thats doing great within its 8 months. I also found that what works and what not in blogging is the most visited section on my blog.
17. Engagement.
To get noticed, you need to notice others. Share other people’s content and comment on theirs and include a link to your blog items that are relevant to posts you are commenting on. Mind it, you should post a relevant link only. Not only this improves your link to be visited by their readers but also it conveys a positive message with your link.
This increase your chance to turn their visitors into yours. Many times it has been seen that blogs having a great post are left aside, because they turn to use some cheap methods to attract traffic. By research it has been found that engaging with other readers in comments or community help build new relationship and strengthen it. It has also been found that it helps you to stand out of the crowd as you start to turn into an authoritative blogger, though it happens very slow but atleast it happens.
WarriorForum, GrowthHackers are the great examples where you not only engage with the community but it also give you the chance to make your blog post viral on their site and attract readers. This great communities can play a viral role in turning you in an authoritative blogger.
Here are some of the posts that are trending and are viewed thousands of times. Forbes also make use of this communities to drive new readers and traffic to their website even they gets tons of visits everyday.
18. Make use of CommentLuv
Commentluv plugin is by far the best way to get more comment on your blog. What Commentluv does is that it gives a link back to the commenter’s site after the comment. This link can be from the most recent 10 posts of him. This will make your blog a hot cake because everyone would like to get more exposure from leaving links to recent articles of them. You got comments and they get exposure and link back. You can also choose to make the links dofollow or nofollow as you wish. I would say make them nofollow.
How To Get CommentLuv Premium Plugin For Free!
It’s powerful enough to send floods of visitors and comments to your blog posts as its just put juicy links from the website of the commentors.
Recent studies and tests found that making use of commentluv plugin in your blog significantly increases your comments and visits by 500% within a month.
Image from NeilPatel.com
What the CommentLuv plugin does: First, it motivates your readers to leave a valuable comment, because the tool will pull their recent post and display it beneath their comment.
Backlinking is great for increasing your blog ranking and its value is search results, so to backlinks either you should get a dofollow comment backlinks or someone mentions you in their comment. Here are Top 50 Backlinking Strategies that works. If you want to use a backlinking using comment to build your brand as well as funnel visitors to your web pages, then comment on these 1,000 DoFollow CommentLuv Blogs.
Sometimes, readers decide not to comment on a blog post simply because they dont find it important or necessary to make a comment or start engaging. But since CommentLuv PLugin is popular in the internet marketing industry and used by thousands of blogs, the readers come to know that when they comment, they would at least gets a juicy dofollow backlinking, as well as more qualified traffic, and gradually grow their blogs.
19. Conduct Contests Between Commentators
Trading comments does not means to pay someone to comment you or buy some services to get comments on your website. In another way its like paying someone but not directly. It has been found that using comments as a way to enter for a great prize is great way to get comments. If you want to soft-force readers to provide some value in exchange for your sweet contest, make them respond with their thought for your question to enter into the contest.
If you are conducting contests by giving some gifts or rewards to your top commentators or readers , then comments will flood your post . As I am also a Web Designer, I give away 10 – 50 Theme License to my readers and commentors for free for lifetime
So rewarding your readers and giving them great value of contents always to keep them engaging and checking you back.
20. Revive the dead, The old archives
Archives and old post can also increase comments on your blog. Archives play an important role in this digital age, it helps your blog to turn into a library. If you published a post a year back or two and noticed that only a few people discovered it, then you can give it a second chance by updating the post and making it updated.
In this way I managed to get thousands of visitors to my 2 posts which are Solution for Bluehost Malware Account Deactivation & How to install Ioncube in your cPanel
Maybe the topic you wrote earlier doesn’t contains deep information or it wasn’t trending at the time it was first published. Or maybe you only had few blog readers at the time. But now, you can leverage the post to gain some fresh comments.
Note: Add the date at the top of the post when you first published it. It not only helps the readers to know how good and updated the topic is but also but also sets you as an authoritative blogger in that niche
21. Ask people to comment
When you end the post with a question or an attempt for seeking advice of the reader, you are sure to get their words via comment. Regular readers tend to share their opinion on the topic and this will help you get interacted with your readers and also from your viewpoint of getting more comments
Allowing you readers to share their opinion with your and other readers will tend them to stay with your blog for longer period and check back later for other peoples comments.
Sometimes, you have to lead your readers to start a discussion. In fact, I’ll do this at the end of this post.If you’re a beginner or a newbie to blogging, it may be difficult to start generating a lot of comments on your blog posts. There are several reasons:
You don’t have a following and loyal audience yet.
Your content lacks uniqueness.
You don’t comment on other blogs.
Your credibility and expertise is still an open question in the industry.
Your blog is pretty new.
Your topics are not that great for comment
Your contents are already published
And so on…
Conclusion
Let me know what you think of this 21 Hack into Comment Strategies. Share your valuable opinion in the comment below.
Throughout this article, I’ve shown you step-by-step how to increase blog comments on your blog posts with implementing simple steps that helps generating comments
You have seen several authority bloggers who successfully follow these same strategies and have acheived great results
What other strategies have you used to increase your blog comments?
This post 21 Hacks to make your Readers comment on your Blog is from The Smart Active Blogger. oh! SAB.