You’ve invested your time and money into creating a blog. You worked hard to write several posts. You expected to see dozens or even hundreds of comments by now…
But that’s just not happening. What can the reasons be?
The Three Crucial Steps
Imagine your average visitor. What are the key steps leading him/her to leave comments on your blog?
- First, the visitor has to actually visit the blog page with a certain post.
- Second, the content has to be interesting enough to keep the visitor’s attention till the end of the post. At the same time, it has to elicit certain emotions and thoughts, the two major components of any comment.
- Third, nothing should prevent the user from leaving that comment, both technically and psychologically.
It’s as simple as that: the more people you manage to get through these three steps on your blog, the more comments you have.
Everything matters
Important: these three steps should go together. Your total success is the multiplication of your efficiency on each of the three steps. If you’re extremely good at any one or even two of them, but fail to take care of the third one—your work is in vain.
For instance, imagine you have paid to get 5,000 visitors daily. What do they do if they visit your blog and find nothing exciting on it?
That’s right, they leave and never come back—without the slightest desire to comment on anything. In the same way, a perfect blog with perfect content will have no comments if you don’t tell the world about it.
1. Get Visitors
Obviously, a person cannot leave a comment on your blog without visiting it. If you want dozens of comments, you’ll need thousands of visitors.
You can use professional SEO and advertising services. You can ask well-known bloggers to advertise your content—especially if you are an influential person, a public figure, or simply a good friend of theirs.
You can spread the word about your blog in social networks. Remember to take into account their specific features. For instance, to get visitors from Twitter, you’ll need to come up with catchy headlines; on Facebook, you can also benefit from a small illustration thumbnail.
Once you get a visitor, it’s expedient to make sure he/she comes back. You can use email and RSS subscriptions, social widgets – try them out and see which works best for you.
2. High-Quality Content
The qualities of good content are numerous. It should be worth the readers’ time, ensure in-depth coverage of the topic, and include interesting details.
To get lots of good comments, make your posts emotional and thought-provoking. If you fail to elicit any emotion, the visitor will most likely leave no comment at all. And if the visitors are not inspired to think, you can’t expect their comments to be meaningful.
3. The Ease of Leaving a Comment
Make sure that leaving a comment goes smoothly and is not too difficult for an average user.
On the technical side, this means good usability. The comment section shouldn’t differ much from the similar functionality on other blogs. It shouldn’t require complicated registration procedures. It shouldn’t be situated several screens away from the content.
On the psychological side, your visitors should see that commenting is appreciated on your blog. You can directly encourage comments in the end of your post. But what’s even more important, the visitor should see there are some comments already. If your blog is new, ask your friends to leave some comments for starters. The ‘recent comments’ widget can help, too.
Bottom Line
In short, the secret of success boils down to putting yourself in your visitors’ shoes. What should be done for them to learn about your blog? What would make a post engaging for your visitors? What would encourage them to comment? Finally, would you comment in their place?
Asking yourself these questions will help to shift your perspective from egoism to genuine care for others. And that is what any good service or product is truly about.
About the Author: Bob Ferguson is a content writer at collegehwhelp.com. He is passionate about writing academic papers and marketing.