How to Get More Blog Comments

Many bloggers are looking to increase the comments on their blog so I thought I’d share my experiences in this area. Number of comments and comments per post are popular stats to look at because they can show how well your blog is doing in developing conversation and community with readers.

My stats are not that great. I’ve published 173 posts so far on my gaming blog and received 443 comments. This comes out to just a little over 2.5 comments per post. But over my last 15 posts, I’ve been averaging over 8 comments per post. That number has been encouraging since I only have 120 RSS subscribers.

Based on my experience, here are some tips to consider:

Drive more traffic. Unsurprisingly, my high traffic posts tend to have the most comments. With more eyeballs to your posts, you have more chances that some of the visitors will leave a comment. That’s why you’ll find a lot of comments on the top blogs even though some of their posts may not be that deserving of a comment.

Write longer posts. I have a few posts that haven’t received a lot of traffic but they still attract many comments. Most of these posts are longer than the average blog entry. They are at least 1000 words. It makes sense that longer content attracts more blog comments. The more info you have, the more chances your readers have of finding something interesting in the post and responding to it. They may not find the post as a whole very remarkable but a small section in the post could entice them to comment.

Of course, don’t just write more words when a few will do. You don’t want to be like the long-winded college student trying to meet a word requirement for a term paper. Instead, think of a topic you can elaborate on, a topic that will take more than 500 words to explain. Then, explain it as best you can.

Give the conversation time to develop. Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, says you should space your posts at least 3-4 days apart. This gives your audience more time to converse in the comment section since the latest post tends to get more attention than the other posts. At first, Tim tried posting more regularly. However, he felt like the post frequency cut off the conversation of the older post too soon. His readers would stop focusing on the previous post and move on to the newest post. He did a test and sure enough he found that he got more comments per post by publishing them farther apart.

Fortunately, I stumbled on this strategy by accident. I initially wanted to post every weekday or every other weekday. But I realized I was too busy and 1-2 posts per week was the best I could do.

Create unique content. Unique content gets people talking because it jolts them out of their comfort zone and makes them think. But make sure your content is conceptually unique – not just a rewrite of existing stuff your audience already knows. Check out Sugarrae’s classic post, When Unique Content Is Not “Unique”, for more information.

Reply to your comments. If you want to provide a place where people feel free to discuss, you should provide a good example. Respond to your comments especially the ones from your regulars. Make them feel like you value their interaction. Realize that many of them will revisit your blog to see if you will reply. If you don’t, they may stop leaving comments.

Include a call to action. If you want your readers to leave comments, ask for their opinion at the end of the post. Also, tell them they’re free to ask questions and you’ll do your best to answer them.

Over to You

How do encourage comments on your blog?

Performancing offers blog management services.

What Do You Do When People Turn Your Blog Into a Forum?

Don’t you just love it when your blog ranks #1 on relevant search queries? I do. Of course, the drawback here is that when a blog post becomes sticky in the number one spot, sometimes you tend to get too many visitors who are not too familiar with the format of your site being a blog. They turn the comment section into a question-and-answer forum.

Take for instance my post about Filipino economists dated four years back. It is, by far, one of my more best-read posts. It just consists of about four intelligible sentences. Thing is, that particular post has been getting dozens and dozens of inquiries from students asking for help with their assignment. It goes as far as these folks asking for the finished product itself!

I’ve actually updated the post to point prospective researchers to better resources, but many just ignore the note and ask ahead. Perhaps the presence of a comment thread and message box makes it seem as if it’s an online forum, which can be one good way of seeking feedback and posing questions online.

But what do you do when things get out of hand and people treat one particular blog post as a forum? Here are a few things I can think of.

• Close the comment thread. Things could get out of hand, and comments might tend to be off-topic anyway. So you an always disable feedback for this particular post. Or, you can run a plugin that closes comment threads when a post reaches a particular age.
• Participate in the conversation. This can be particularly useful if the post is about a hot topic, and if the discussions are still highly relevant even after dozens and hundreds of comments. Why not enjoy your post’s popularity?
• Update your post. If people are looking for information, and others contribute in the comment thread, then you can update your post to include these relevant information. You could then hope that readers will get the idea, but of course users who are too lazy to really read through an article will still keep on asking questions even if the answers are right in front of them.

On my posts that get this much attention, I usually try a combination of these. But of course, I still get a ton of comments in which the reader is asking for something that is already there.

How to handle blog comments left in another language

David has already raised the issue of real comments with spammy URLs, and that’s something to deal with in its own right, but what I often find is comments left in another language (sometimes including a link) which I have to debate what to do with.

What can you do with comments left in a language that differs from you and your blog’s native tongue? Here are three ideas.

Delete the comment outright

This seems a little unfair, though it could be argued that if someone is genuinely leaving a comment on your blog (and has therefore understood the blog post well enough to leave an informed response) then they should be able to leave the comment in the same language.

However, the visitor may have used an automatic translation service to read your article and yet feels more comfortable leaving a comment in their own language.

They may be able to read and understand the language you use but find it hard to write in that language.

Simply deleting the comment outright may save you time but it could potentially alienate one of your visitors, and who knows how influential that person might be?

You could add this as part of the comment policy for your blog, of course, but it could still be perceived as a snub.

Translate and leave comment in original language

If you’re fortunate enough to speak the same language as the person who commented, or are happy to trust an automatic translation tool such as Google Translate, you can check to ensure that the comment is relevant to the entry and that the link doesn’t lead to a spam site.

Doing an automatic translation may miss some nuances, but you should get the overall flavor of the comment and be able to work out whether it’s a keeper.

Translate and publish a translation

As above, but instead of simply checking out the comment for your own peace of mind, publish a translation (either verbatim, paraphrase, or summary) in the primary language of the blog.

This is done more for the benefit of your other visitors, but be particularly careful with automatic translations because you may well miss nuances or find that some words (especially “slang” for that particular language) are incorrectly translated or not translated at all.

Getting help

If you receive a large amount of traffic from a particular region where another language is predominantly spoken, it might be worth investigating partnering with someone who speaks that language to handle comment moderation for you.

Conclusions

The admin involved in dealing with comments can be fairly high, whatever language they’re left in.

I don’t have statistics for how much spam is left in other languages, or whether spammers are deliberately using non-English languages to try to fool automated spam filters and human detection, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

At the end of the day, it’s your blog and you can choose how to handle the comments you receive. However, I’d recommend making some effort to check them out rather than simply purging them.

What’s your strategy for handling comments left in other languages?