How to increase comments on your blog

If you get a conversation going on your blog – you are a winner. Well, all of us want people to comment on our posts as that is the single most encouraging factor for a blogger to continue blogging[well, along with monetary benefits of course :)]

Along with great content, we also need give our readers something for those informative comments. So, here are a couple of ways which will help you boost or skyrocket comments on your blog:

1. DoFollow – This is the first thing you need to do. As per the standard settings, WordPress blogs are NoFollow i.e. they do not give backlinks [immensely helpful for SEO purposes] to the bloggers who comment on their posts. Once you enable DoFollow; you will see a drastic rise in the number of comments. Download.
2. Comment Luv – If you go into the comments section in this post; you will see a tab called ‘comment luv’ under the comment bar. This plugin gives the blogger an option to leave a link of his last post on his blog. The link will help him drive traffic to his own blog as well as give you the much needed comments. Download
3. Threaded Comments – This plugin gives you a reply option on each and every comment and when you comment; you reply goes directly under that comment.  This plugin helps increase comments, makes it easy for people to reply and at the same time prevents readers from scrolling down to look for answers to their questions. Download
4. Top Commentators: This plugin displays the names of the readers along with the number of comments on the side bar of your blog. The plugin provides you the option to reset the list every hour, day, week, month or year. Download
5. Subscribe to Comments – This plugin let’s your readers subscribe to comments and the ongoing discussion. Readers get a notification when any comment is posted in the discussion. This helps in continuing the discussion. Download

IMPORTANT – To increase your backlinks here is a list of some of the best blogs with both DoFollow and CommentLuv enabled. Comment on them and increase your search rank and page rank – Click Here

A point to remember – Approve only RELEVANT comments and comments that add to the conversation. For comments like ‘great’ or ‘thank you’ you will always have the option of removing do follow and as well as commentluv from that comment. Also, while you use all these plugins; don’t forget that what matters the most is CONTENT. So, ensure you have the right content in place.

If you know of any more important plugins, do let me know and I would be happy to add it here.