Silent Chatter

>Do you see that you are getting visitors but no one but you is commenting? Feel like you are talking to yourself?  Wish more people would drop by and say something? Anything? I may be new to having my own blog, but I am not new to blogging.  I am a follower of many blogs and have been for years.  For a long time I was a learker, never feeling comfortable or invited to participate in the disscussion or or contribute to the content.   Because of my experience on the the opposite side of the blog, I wanted to share some things I noticed would prompt me to comment on your blog:

 1.Encourage people to subscribe to your feeds.

Simply the more people who visit, the more comments you are likely to have.  By readers subscribing to feeds they will always know when you have new posts for them to  comment on.

2. Making leaving a comment easy!

It’s best not to request that visitors register to leave comments, this is time consuming for your guest and requires personal information that most people would rather not share. I would forget about  using captcha (the wanky letters and numbers that hurt your eyes, that sites make you enter to prove you are a real person).  This may prevent spammers but it will definitely prevent guest comments as well.  Just make sure you moderate your comments or add a plugin that will help catch spammers.

3. Let people know you are listening.

Respond to you comments.  Let them know about what you think about what they have to say.  It needn’t be a one way conversation on their end either!  This will promote readers to continue to comment on your other posts.

4.  Be respectful.

It’s perfectly ok to disagree with a comment, but doing so in a rude or disrespectful way will not encourage others to participate in the conversation.

5.  What are people interested in

You will probably notice that some of your posts are more comment friendly than others.  Review your post and comments to see if you detect differences in content or style of writing.  Maybe you’ll even notice that you have impletmented some of these tips!  Another way to do this is to have a good states tracker, to better understand who your demographic is, so that you may better focus on posts that would actually appeal to yourlargest  population of readers.

6. Leave open ended posts.

Ask questions of your readers, engage them.  Let people know you want their opinions, suggestions or critiques. Don’t  talk an issue to death, leave something for people to add and the think about.  Unless of course you feel that you an expert on the topic, and are not interested in other’s input, if that is the case you probably wouldn’t be reading this post, and you can always turn comments off.

7. Ask people to comment.

Let people know that you want to hear from them. Encourage those more timid people, by sending out an invite to your guests to participate. You may not mind posting for the whole world wide web to view..But not everyone has a blog or feels comfortable sharing their thoughts, so letting your guest know you welcome their input and views may encourage feedback.

8. Encourage new commenter’s.

I know that I have been to sites that almost feel like private parties.  Don’t be afraid to comment on your own  post after an ongoing dialogue  encouraging other thoughts or input on the topic.

9. Write good content and write it often.

Writing information that is useful, entertaining, and thought proving will automatically trigger someone to have an opinion about it. The more you post the more people have to comment on.  I find my readers who do  comment, will comment on more than one post  More posts + good content=more comments.

10. Reward good comments.

This can be done simply by letting them know you appreciate your insight, you can have a link to some of the top comments, visiting their blog site and commenting on their posts, to even writing posts that mention their thoughts or link back to their sites. I find that people who do comment are more likely to return to my site, knowing I have an active audience encourages me to continue to write and to improve the quality of my writing.  So I do hope you will take the time to let me know that you were here and let me know if there are other ways I could engage readers to comment. How about you?  Have you found something that helps to attract comments to your blog? P.S. I use Comment luv plugin…..giving luv to my readers with sites