If You Make a Post on Your Blog & No One is Around to Read it…
March 1, 2010
..is much like: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound.
When you first start a blog, one of the most difficult things to do is to get people to comment. Our Egos would like a little bit of recognition for the amount of time we spend in front of our computer dealing with the ‘brain pain’ of writing something meaningful and enduring the constant ‘clicky clicky’ of our fingers on the keyboard. Putting Ego aside there is a much more important reason that you want people to be leaving comments on your blog: You need to build a community around your blog.
Most likely the number one reason you started a blog, or added one to your website was for the marketing aspect. You were told that if you had a product or service you should create a blog and continually add content about said product/service. This is completely correct, however it is missing one important point: In this world of Social Networking you need to be building a community around your product/service. Sure creating fresh content for your site is making Google happy, and helping a bit with your SEO, but the fact is you need to show that people are interested in your product/service.
You need to build your flock; A community around your blog. Aside from trying to get an increase in traffic, there are a few things you can do to your blog now to build your community and interact with your potential customers.
Ask For It.
When you write your post find a way to include some kind of discussion point, or ask for the readers input at the end of the post. Quite often posts that exhibit a strong opinion on a certain topic will garner quite a bit of comments, especially from people that oppose your view points. Darren Rowse from Pro Blogger wrote an article about types of posts that get comments
Notify Users of Comments
By default on most blogs, when someone leaves a comment it is up to them to return to the site to check and see if anyone had responded to their comments. A great way to increase the conversation on your posts is to allow people to be notified of comments. For Wordpress there is a great plugin created by Mark Jaquith called “Subscribe to Comments” which adds the option for the user to be notified if someone responded to their comment.
Reward Your Top Commentators.
There is another great Wordpress plugin by Lorna Timbah called “Top Commentators Widget” that allows you to show a list in your sidebar of the people who make the most comments on your blog. Quite often this becomes a friendly contest between people to try and stay on the ‘leader board,’ so they keep coming back to make more comments to stay on top.
These are just a few methods that I use to build community around my blogs, so I pose the question to you:
How do you build community around your blog?
Chris Whiteley
Chris Whiteley is a web designer with a passion for blogging. This self proclaimed 'Jack of all trades but a master of none' has working experience in areas such as SEO, Social Media, and Internet Marketing.
March 1st, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Good post Chris. My feelings are that you build a community by being part of a community. If you write in a style that is reflective of your target community you’re more likely to be considered part of, not outside of, that community. On the web that not only means writing succinctly, it can also mean writing in a less corporate-y way.
Effective community members are part of a two-way (or more) conversation with those around them. You don’t want to be that guy on the soap box telling the crowd what it’s doing wrong, so spend some time finding the other blog writers and forums in your community and become involved in their conversation. That way, they are more likely to be interested in what you have to say and they’ll feel much more comfortable commenting on your blog.
March 1st, 2010 at 2:07 pm
Great article Chris. We have been trying to get some comments going on http://blog.scooterunderground.ca
I was always hesitant to leave comments since most WordPress blogs require that I leave my name and email. I think that people worry about setting themselves up for spam when they have to leave this info.
In your experience leaving comments, do you think your email info ever falls into the wrong hands when you do this?
March 1st, 2010 at 3:43 pm
@Michael Stevulak: I tried to come up with some kind of analogy for this but could think of anything. I came up with some kind of war analogy, but ended up just writing a sequel to Apocalypse Now. Instead I will just say it like it is:
People may worry about spam when leaving their email address when they comment but really that’s just the of cost being on the internet. I’m pretty sure that you could create a new email address, never enter it anywhere and you would still end up on a spam list. Even if you never entered your house address on any piece ever, you would still end up with someone knocking on your door looking for cash. Same with email.
So to answer your question, yes at some point someone somewhere will probably grab your email address and use it for some nefarious purpose. That’s why we have spam filters.
March 1st, 2010 at 4:46 pm
@Michael Stevulak: Fear of spam or worse is common to the average web surfer. On the web, most of us seem to distrust until proven otherwise. However, at some stage, you start trusting a website enough to believe its claims about not abusing your email address. Look at eBay or Amazon, you probably trust them enough to post comments to those sites.
The aim is to become trusted so people are prepared to leave comments.
As you provide more and more useful and insightful information for your blog’s followers, you are gradually increasing goodwill and likewise your cache of trust. Eventually the trust cache will outweigh the fear pit and people will start to leave comments.
You can increase the speed of that by starting to leave relevant and insightful comments on the blogs that you follow.
March 1st, 2010 at 8:21 pm
Bookmarked
March 1st, 2010 at 9:23 pm
Thanks for mentioning the TCW, Chris.
As for getting spam resulting from leaving comments on other people’s blogs, I think it’s very less likely to happen, especially if the comments were made on site that are legit.
I’d be more concerned once comments are flowing all over my blog, making the blog community more active, hence increasing visits and traffic to my blog, in which case comment spams would increase and comment moderation became more tedious (as my blog’s case). The TCW certainly has a hand on making comments more lively, that’s for sure
I had to hide the number of comments a person makes in order for others not to comment just for the sake of appearing in the top commentators list!
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:42 am
Lorna, thanks for the comments. I have definitely seen the top commentators list go the ‘wrong way’ on some blogs with people leaving useless comments to try and be on the number one spot. I have also seen a few blogs that still have the numbers displayed and some hard core moderation takes place to ensure people are still making decent comments.
Of course comment moderation is a real pain the butt, and Akismet doesn’t always win.
For those of you that are keeners, here is another article with a few comment garnering ideas: http://www.sitepronews.com/2010/03/01/7-ways-to-encourage-more-blog-commenting/
March 2nd, 2010 at 11:37 am
@michael stevulak: On second review, I realise that your fear might be about your blog comment being annotated with your email address which would then be easy pickings for spam scrapers. Although most Wordpress comment forms require an email address, they don’t display that email address on the blog.
Wordpress requires your email so that it can notify you of replies to your comment, and to provide that extra level of proof that you’re human.
March 3rd, 2010 at 11:19 pm
Good post Chris – it compelled me to comment, mission accomplished!
Here are a couple of tactics I use to build community around the blog:
1. Be authentic: I use my human voice, not a corporate, press release voice.
2. Understand the reader: I have a sense for who my readers are and try to write with them in mind (level of knowledge etc)
3. Transparency: I’m not afraid of talking about failures or weaknesses. We all have them and it shows we’re human. Usually they’re great learning experiences.
4. Solicit feedback: I like to finish with a question to encourage feedback.
Of course, you can always offer them free stuff for commenting http://ow.ly/1e26G
March 4th, 2010 at 1:15 pm
@chris burdge:
I have seen, and used in the past commenting incentives, and they work quite well. For the long term however I prefer to use incentives to increase RSS subscribers.
I have been thinking of a few freebies for our blog here, of course I have to run it by the boss first…