I have being using Comment relish for a while to greet my first time commentators. I added it to the blog a while ago and it pretty much automates the whole process so I didn't pay much attention to the the plug-in for a while. That is until I went and commented on this blog about work from home. I first found the link via Twitter and the post was about ranking for tough keywords via do follow blog commenting and why it is important to leave your key word or key words as your name. I commented on the article and pretty much forgot about the comment. That is until I saw this mail in my Inbox. It is surely an automated mail but the amount of information given was surprising and made me think of my own message shown in Comment relish. Below image shows the e-mail I got. ( click to enlarge )

E-mail received by first time commentator

As you can see it has a whole lot of information for a first time commentator and also plenty of links pointing back to the blog. First of all there is a link to the blog , then gently pointing at the RSS feed asking the commentator to subscribe to the feed. Then showing a link to the Twitter profile and asking for a follow. Then he is providing a link to a free service he is giving away , which usually is a good way to bring visitors to a web site. Then contact information is provided and finally there's a link to a paid service which is a back link building service. This e-mail was miles ahead of the lame e-mail message I used to send with Comment relish. So immediately after receiving this I changed my message sent out by Comment relish. It is pretty similar to this one but I did some minor changes which I think would perform better.

• Instead of pointing to the blog I linked to the post that the comment was made. I think this way the user is more likely to click on it , at least to check if the author has replied.
• I added the link to my RSS feed but added a link to subscribe to the feed by e-mail as well.

Now that added a link to the post the comment was made I have to make sure that the return visit provides some value to the commentator. Comment relish sends out e-mail almost instantly the comment is made. That doesn't leave me a lot of time to reply to the comment. That's where this article about personalize your comment relish message came in handy. What it basically teaches you is how to get the mail sent to you, so you can personalize it before sending it to the commentator. Want to see comment relish in action ? Leave a comment