Consider this post a question to every blogger out there. How do some people get their readers to comment so much? Looking at the statistics there is no obvious difference in visitors but yet on one blog there can be 20 - 30 comments and on the other 2 - 7. Off course the content matter very much, but I don’t think that is the main reason. There must be something else.
Could it be the visual appearance of the site or the placement of the comment-link. Certainly, but I have seen ugly sites with many comments too. I have a feeling that it has something to do with how active they are reading blogs themselves. Could it be that they comment so much on other blogs that the owners comment back all the time. If so, how on earth do they find the time to read blogs so much.
My very good friend Felix is running a blog in Swedish and we have tried for about a year to make the site’s name famous. It has worked, we’re well known and the name, Zmolklife, has almost become a brand. We have an incredible amount of visitors if you see to the fact that it’s a personal blog. What we don’t have is a steady stream of comments although we know our visitors have things to say. Do I need to change something at the site to make it more attractive or what?
I want you readers to help me with this. Preferably by using the commenting feature 
but you can also send me a mail if you want.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Bobbi-lee // Nov 15, 2007 at 2:45 am
There are a number of reasons.
Sometimes I get over 30+ comments on a post because it is funny or a great story and readers want to tell me their experience. Sometimes I only get 3 comments on an article that I thought would do better. It all depends what the reader wants to read, and if it targets them.
Also if you leave a question (like you have now) at the end of a blog post asking me what my thoughts are on it, or to share a story of their experience the visitors usually will, just like I am. When it is just a straight up and down article, the reader might be very interested and find it helpful but they don’t necessarily want to go comment “hey your article helped me thanks”, they would rather read it, learn and then move on.
So by leaving a question at the end or asking for ones experience creates more interactivity, which visitors love.
I read your articles all the time and I don’t usually comment because I read something useful and bookmark the page. I don’t want to click on *comment* just to say “great article mate”!
Also some visitors are greedy, they only comment on the blogs they want to suck up to (i.e. the ones with high PR) in the hope they get more referrals to their site. Take Jemjabella.co.uk for example, everyone comments her blog post even if it’s a really boring one. If you read through some of her more reason posts, she has left questions throughout each post, so someone is going to read one question and think to themselves *no I don’t really know why* but then read the third question in the post and think *hey I know the answer to that, you…* and then they comment. Her posts invoke discussion and encourage people to contribute.
Another reason people don’t comment is because they read your blog through a feed reader, and they are too lazy to visit your website itself. You can let visitors comment through a feed reader by using feedburner, to do this just activate FeedFlare. Under FeedFlare, you’ll see checkboxes and put a check on “Comments Count”. After doing that, subscribers will see the number of comments just below each syndicated post. They can just click that to leave a comment without ever leaving the comfort of their feed reader.
Replying to comments makes a big difference too. I don’t mean going to their blog to reply on their post which is totally unrelated. Reply to them on your post page and most of the time the visitor will return to see if you replied back. Not a standard reply like “Thanks for commenting” but something that invokes more discussion. For example, lets say you posted a blog about “What font size is best” and your post discussed what font and size *you* preferred, and then asked the visitors what font and size they preferred. The visitor replies with “I love verdana 12px”, how about asking them “why is it that you like verdana and why at 10px. Have you ever tried Arial at 12px..” etc. Then more than likely they will have returned, saw a reply and replied back. That in itself is added comments even though you are contributing. Then lets see another visitor comes along and reads your blog, reads the other visitors comment and decided to say “actually I have to disagree with both of you…” and so the discussion continues.
Ok I think I will stop there, this is a rather long comment. Hopefully now you will take my tips on board, respond back and then others may put more input in. I may even turn this into a blog post with some more advice.
2 Bobbi-lee // Nov 15, 2007 at 2:56 am
I don’t think my long comment went through so I will just wait and see, if not I will try again.
I did just think of a few more reasons.
1. Page cuts. You have your blog cute (read more link), no-one wants to read half of what you say which may not be interesting at the start, then have to click on read more just to read the rest. Visitors hate clicking, the less clicking the quicker they can read and decide whether to comment or not. It just makes sense to not cut blogs down to a read more link and leave it all out there as one whole post.
Link backs- Offer visitors link back in the form of “plugs”. Wordpress has many “plugging” plugins that automatically leave a link at the bottom of your post with all the people who commented your site. So they get link backs, and you get comments everyone wins.
Comment box- I don’t think yours works properly, and on Firefox the actual text area is way down near the footer whilst the name and email fields are at the top. Don’t hold comments for moderation unless you have a serious spam problem. You can use Akismet for Wordpress which will get rid of spam and the need to moderate comments. Visitors like to see their comment up straight away so they know it went through. If you *must* hold it for moderation, tell the visitor *after* they have posted it that it is being held for moderation.
You haven’t told me my comment is being held for moderation, so I don’t know where my comment has disappeared and it has me worried. If this were a new site I had never visited before I would try re-comment and if it doesn’t show I would leave the site and probably never comment again (though I would keep reading future blog posts).
Also I have commented on your site before, now I am curious as to whether or not they went through, perhaps your comment form is missing something?!
3 IntoTheRain.Org » Blog Archive » Why Won’t My Visitors Comment? // Nov 15, 2007 at 2:11 pm
[…] was reading Emil’s post about not receiving comments and I started to write my comment. Soon enough my comment was so long it warranted it own blog […]
4 Britney // Nov 16, 2007 at 9:04 pm
It is so funny you posted this. I was viewing traffic statistics of some other sites (ha, I am nosy) the other day and I typed in a link to someone’s site where I noticed that they get HUNDREDS (yes, hundreds) of comments on one entry. But I noticed that I get more traffic to my blog than this site does, and I get maybe 20 some comments at the most, but usually fewer. I found it slightly odd.
5 Forrest // Nov 17, 2007 at 10:05 pm
I’m more in the two to seven comments category myself, which is already an improvement for me…
Emil, when you consider dropping the read more link, well, there’s a lot to consider. You don’t want your home page to scroll on for days and days, at least I don’t. Also, unless you upgrade to the new WordPress, assuming that’s your CMS, your RSS feed will publish everything up to the read more break. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. Do you get scrapers? Every time I post something, there are five or more trackbacks from different blogs that release 50+ posts a day, all of them with the beginning of somebody else’s post and a link pointing back. They’re run by software “robots” and provide no value to anyone. They annoy me, so I make sure not to publish everything in RSS.
I’ve been thinking about removing the nofollow from my comment links. I still haven’t decided … I know that will encourage more comments, but I think a lot of them would be quick, one line, only looking for a link. Like you said, quality vs quantity, right? Still, I know a lot of other people have done exactly that and see a lot more comments because of it.
Britney - I’m curious, are you looking at Alexa stats? Do that many sites publish their server logs? Or do you have another source I don’t know about…?
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