Turning commentators in to loyal readers

Since the buzz is about increasing the number of comments and the quality of comments I though this is a good time to talk about how to turn that commentators into loyal readers of your blog. This is even more important to do if you are getting good traffic from search engines because they are more likely to subscribe to your blog.And if you are a self hosted Wordpress user like me there are few handy plug-ins available to help you in this task. And if you are blogspot or user of any other platform user still these tips might come in handy.

Reply to comments

Unless you are getting hundreds of comments which makes replying a bit tedious you should be quick to give a reply to your commentators.This is especially true if the commentator has asked a question to a problem he is facing. Most blogging platforms has the option of notifying you via e-mail as soon as someone comments so enabling this is good way to be notified immediately

Enable subscribe to comments

You can give a option to your commentators to subscribe to the comments in a post.This way as soon as a new comment appears the original commentator is notified and he might revisit to check what is being said. I use the subscribe to comments plug-in to enable this. For Blogspot users I couldn’t find a hack for this option but you can ask your readers to subscribe to your comments RSS feed.

Target the first time commentators

People who comment on your posts usually do because they like what you have written , if he’s a first time commentator you can say thank you and ask him to subscribe to your RSS feed or something like that. I use this handy free plug-in comment relish to do that. Want to check out how it works ? Comment and find out

Reward your Commentators

Best way to increase your comments and to get repeat visits from your commentators is to reward you visitors. There are many ways to do that , adding widgets like Top Commentators and SezWho , writing a thank you post once a month are some of the good ways to do that. I’m not a great fan of removing the nofollow tag but some blogs have seeing great results from that.

Doing this simple things can really help to increase your subscribers and improve your repeat visitor count , Got some great tips about commenting ? Be sure to share them in the comments section.