How to generate more comments on your blogs

If you aren't receiving many comments on your blog, your website can start to feel a bit lonely. Getting readers to comment on your posts is a matter of engagement and building community.

Readers will keep coming back to pages containing content that interests them and on which they can engage in lively discussions with the page moderator and other readers. If this interactive community is not present on your blog, readers will tend to move somewhere else.

Ask the right questions

There are a number of strategies you can use to generate greater reader engagement with your blog posts. One is to ask readers to respond to questions. This can be a great way of finding out more about customer needs as well as building a community.

Just make sure you are asking the right questions – readers will respond well to questions that are genuinely seeking to gather information or opinions. This strategy can backfire badly, however, if you ask questions that are only seeking a pat on the back, as McDonald’s and Qantas have discovered the hard way in recent years.

When readers comment on your blogs, respond to them in a timely fashion. Thank them for commenting and, if appropriate, respond in a way that keeps the conversation going. If readers feel they are being engaged, they are more likely to continue to comment.

Keep your content relevant

It should go without saying, but it also important to ensure you have relevant, up-to-date content that relates directly to your readers’ interests and needs.

Addressing topical issues can be useful, provided you do so in a way that is timely and appropriate to the nature of your business. Discretion is important here – if you are trying to sell a product or service, think carefully about what issues you link your product to. You don’t want to be boring, but controversial topics are often best avoided, and the very last thing you want to be seen doing is exploiting any suffering or bad news story for the sake of a sale.

Lastly, remember that the internet is a vast repository of information, and often the only thing keeping readers on your page is the fact that the information or perspective you provide can’t be found elsewhere. Before writing a blog post, do a quick search for similar articles and see what you can offer that’s new or original.

Have you read any other great tips on getting feedback on Blogs, or learnt some yourself?  Tell us your thoughts?