How to Get More Comments

Sunday, February 07 2010 - commenting, social-media, social-networking

Every writer on the web wants to get as many comments on what they write as they can.  I’d personally love to see more comments on the things that I write here.  Whether it’s because you want to have more fulfilling conversations regarding the things you write about, you want criticisms or critiques of your writing in general, or you just like the attention, the more comments, the better.  The question is, how can you get more comments?  Here are some ideas:

Increase Your Readership

This kind of goes without saying – the more readers you have, the more people willing to comment you will get as well.  I’m going to go into detail on a few ways to increase your site traffic, but here are a few quick ideas to get you going:

• Improve your search engine optimization (SEO)
  • The closer you are to the first page on search engines for terms that you are aiming for, the more likely it will be for someone to click through to get to your site.
  • Basic things like good URL naming conventions, proper formatting of your content (using heading tags properly) and setting the HTML title element to reflect the current content (as opposed to just displaying your site name each time) will do wonders in improving your search engine visibility.
• Talk about your posts on other sites – sites with common themes having links to your site and posts will draw additional readers to your site.
  • Note that this does not mean to spam other blogs and forums with links to your posts.  You need to do things appropriately, which means only providing a link if it is relevant to the conversation (forum signatures are an exception – see next point).
• Advertise – mention your latest post to your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, anywhere on the web that people might be paying attention to you.
  • Also, having a signature on forums that you post that shows your latest posts can help drive in the traffic.  Feedburner (a free service from Google for RSS feeds) provides the ability to do something like this:
    
     

Write More Often

The more you write, the more content you have available for people to comment on.  Also, the more pages of content you have available on your site, the higher ranked you will become with search engines.  Search engines give preferences to sites with a lot of content as opposed to just a few pages that rarely change.

To go along with this, make sure that you have new content available fairly regularly.  Daily (if you can manage it) is great, but weekly is very good as well.  Once you start getting down to biweekly or monthly, your website will drop out of the minds of your readers.  If you can get it into your readers’ minds to check out your site every day or every week, it will just become part of their routine.

Don’t Let Technology Become a Barrier

You want to get comments, but at the same time, you don’t want your pages to be littered with spam.  To combat this, there are various mechanisms available, such as requiring registration/logging in or some form of CAPTCHA.  CAPTCHA does a decent job of preventing spam, but it also does a pretty good job of preventing real users from leaving comments.  For me personally, if I can’t read the CAPTCHA image correctly the first time, I normally decide that the commenting isn’t worth any more of my time.  I am sure that many people are the same way.

The other option that you have is registration.  If you are using any sort of platform for your site, it undoubtedly offers a way to require readers to register in order to comment.  The problem is, unless you are on a really large site like CNN or the New York Times, what’s the likelihood that someone is going to want to take the time to register just to comment on your site?  For most users, it is pretty low.

You want to make sure that the barrier to action is low, while still affording you and your site some protection.  Luckily, there are several solutions popping up that can help with this.  One is the common login – two well known providers of this are OpenID and Facebook Connect.  They both allow a user to have a shared login that is used across many sites.  OpenID has an advantage with Google making itself available as a provider, so anyone with a Google account for any purpose (including Gmail) can easily have a valid OpenID URL.  Facebook Connect, obviously, is linked to your Facebook account, and with the service recently passing 300 million users, more often than not, the visitors to your site will probably already have a facebook account.

For both of these services, you would still want to provide a method to register on your site (in case a reader has neither already available to them and/or doesn’t want to use them).  This is where another service in particular fits in quite nicely.  Disqus is a commenting service that you can plug into your site, replacing whatever commenting system that may already be in place (or adding comments to sites that currently have no support for them).  This site currently uses Disqus for comments, so you can get an idea of what it looks like.  Disqus allows site visitors to log in using any one of a number of providers, including Facebook Connect, OpenID, and even Twitter.  Visitors can also choose to create or log in with a Disqus account directly.  For site owners, it provides a level of spam protection on top of requiring some form of login and also provides a nice moderation and admin interface.  You can also moderate multiple websites from a single location if you have multiple sites.  Overall, this is a very nice solution when you are just looking to leverage commenting as a means of interaction on your website.

Leave Things Open for Discussion

You can’t provide all of the answers if you would like comments.  If you do that, what else is anyone going to have to say?  I’ve provided a few ideas here, but there are undoubtedly others still out there, just waiting to be posted (hint, hint).