A blog without comments is like a teacher without students, you’ll just talk to the wind and get no response in return, that’s cruel and not fun at all right? Comments are good to your blog, when you write a blog post, commentators will be sharing their experiences or point of views, they will be also giving valuable critique on particular matter. With that said, the comments help in improving yourself as well as your blog.

There many blogs out there don’t get any comments on any of their blog posts, there is few factors that cause this happened, but that’s not the matter that we’re going to discuss in this post. Comments are good to your blog, here I’ll share about ways to encourage your readers to leave comments.

7 Ways To Increase Participation Rate

1. Use CommentLuv Plugin: There are many wordpress plugins that would help to increase participation rate in your blog. Commentluv is a wordpress plugin that displays the latest blog post from the commentators in the comments. In this way, readers who want to promote their latest blog posts to drive more traffic to their blog, they may want to leave a comment.
2. Use KeywordLuv Plugin: KeywordLuv is another wordpress plugin that encourage readers to leave a comment. It enables commentator to get a backlink with their preferrable keyword in the name section. Who doesn’t like keyword backlink, right?
3. Use Top Commentator Plugin: This plugin has been used by many bloggers and many people like this feature. As the name of plugin, blog owner places a top commentator widget on the blog to shows the commentators who leave the most comments, usually top 5 of them. Usually the links in Top Commentator section are dofollow, people who likes dofollow backlink would want to compete with each other and get into the top commentator section.
4. Make Your Blog Dofollow: People looks at dofollow blog is like bees see the honey, everyone likes dofollow blog and would like to get a dofollow backlink from the blog, don’t you? Making your blog dofollow definitely increases the participation rate. When I first made my blog dofollow, I can obviously saw the number of comments increased day by day, of course I became strict in moderating comments, some of them were valuable comment while some of them were spam.
5. Call To Action: If you want your readers to leave comment, then you should have quality content on your blog. Try not to be too serious or technical in the blog post, people would find difficulty in leaving a comment. Also, ask a simple question at the end of the post, that’s what we called “Call To Action”. Readers would be happy to answer your question.
6. Comment In Other Blogs: Have you heard about “You comment, I comment back”? When you’re leaving a comment in other blogs, the blog owners might be more comfortable to visit your blog and leave a comment in return. Not all blog owners will do that but no harm for you to leave a comment in other blogs, remember the concept “Give before you take”.
7. Commenting Contest: That’s the most effective way to drive you tons of comment on every blog post in your blog. Holding a commenting contest, rewarding great prizes such as cash, banner advertisement, logo design and the like, for readers who leave the most comments on your blog. I’ve seen a few bloggers held commenting contest which gave out $100 cash on their blog, they simply received up to 100 comments in every blog post. However, that would lead to huge unspecific comments to the blog because everyone wants to win the contest.

Group Reflection

Comments are important and good to our blog, but the quality of the comments used to be more important. I’m pretty sure that you prefer quality over quantity.

What do you think? Besides of the above methods, what method that you used to increase the participation rate on your blog?