MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

When you have really good posts on your blog, it prob­a­bly both­ers you when you don’t get as much feed­back as you’d hoped. Some­times, there are no com­ments at all when what you really want is to feel appre­ci­ated buy your read­ers. I’ve iden­ti­fied seven ways to increase the com­ments you receive on your blog posts.

1. Incen­tivize.

Give peo­ple a rea­son to com­ment. The clas­sic way method is to hold a con­test and give away prizes for the best com­ments on your blog within a spe­cific period of time. This will spike up com­ments because, obvi­ously, peo­ple always want to win something.

Unfor­tu­nately, it prob­a­bly isn’t the most long term solu­tion because once the prizes are gone, peo­ple won’t be moti­vated to com­ment any more.

2. Keep The Con­ver­sa­tion Going.

The writ­ers and own­ers of the blog have to step in to respond to com­ments. In gen­eral, peo­ple are often very guilty of look­ing at their posts but not respond­ing even when peo­ple write nice things about them because they are sim­ply too busy.

But, accord­ing to Yaro Starak, the minute you stop respond­ing to the com­ments left on your blog, all the com­ments will stop flow­ing because to the reader, it shows that you, the blog­ger, don’t care. The con­verse side is that when peo­ple see you actu­ally tak­ing the time to respond, they’ll care because you care too.

3. Kiss Ass. Strate­gi­cally.

If you want to get the atten­tion of other blog­gers, write about them. For exam­ple, you could write about Seth Godin in your post and hope­fully, either through track back or through a search engine, he’ll find your post and leave a com­ment on your blog.

I think you’d agree that it’s cool to have Seth Godin leave a note in your com­ment box. We’ve had pretty impres­sive peo­ple com­ment on our blog lately — Jack Humphrey and Paulie Sabol, among oth­ers, so it’s a pretty neat way to attract their attention.

4. Be Con­tro­ver­sial.

Write on a topic you can’t be neu­tral about. Write about some­thing such that you’re either on one side of the fence or the other. You could give your take on Hilary and Obama, or other cur­rent issues. In Inter­net mar­ket­ing, a pop­u­lar one is, “All Gurus Suck.” You just need to keep the con­ver­sa­tion going.

5. Be Rel­e­vant.

Use the USA Today Secret about which I spoke ear­lier, which is basi­cally find­ing the most rel­e­vant things in the prospects’ heads, be it through USAToday.com or CNN – and blog about it, con­nect­ing it to your story.

You will prob­a­bly get more com­ments because that’s at the top of the prospects’ minds.

6. Email Them Nicely.

Use your auto respon­der to email them and say, “Hey, the blog’s a bit lonely, why don’t you join the con­ver­sa­tion?” which has been proven to boost responses.

7. Ask Spe­cific Ques­tions.

I think this is the most pow­er­ful. On the blog itself, ask specif­i­cally, “Now tell us, what can this tech­nique do for your busi­ness?” Be sure to ask spe­cific ques­tions, and not to just say, “Tell us what you think”. Email your read­ers, or ask them on your blog.

Ask ques­tions that draw them out, for exam­ple, by ask­ing how the con­tent of that par­tic­u­lar blog post will ben­e­fit them.

Blog com­ments do help with the search engine opti­miza­tion of your blog, and increas­ing the num­ber of com­ments on your blog is to your advan­tage. On a more per­sonal level, once your blog com­mu­nity becomes more active and engaged, you will get to know your read­ers and that you will feel that no effort you put into writ­ing your posts goes unnoticed.

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About the Author

Kenneth Yu is a tormented artist, but he was determined not to be a starving one. This is the primary reason why this D&AD award-winning advertising creative has plunged into the world of Internet entrepreneurship, and the rest -- as they say -- is history. Straddling both the creative and business realm, Kenneth combines bullet-fast ideation and his vast experience working with the big brands to alchemize marketing gold as the Head Copywriter and Marketing Strategist in MindValley. He shares more out-of-the-box marketing and copywriting tips (plus cool irreverent stuff) on his Twitter

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