A Comprehensive New Age Guide to Increase Comments on your Blog – Part 2
If your blog and the blog posts on it are attracting a lot of comments, then you must be doing a whole lot of things right. All bloggers worth their salt know that increasing comments on their blog is difficult and if they are able to accomplish this feat, they have got a very successful blog on their hands.
Have you read the first part?
In the first part, I took you through 8 ways, methods or strategies, call them what you will, all geared to increase the comments on a blog.
Now, without wasting any further time, let me take you through 6 more.
Quoting a Well Known Authority and Letting them Know through Twitter
Say you are writing something about blogging and you know of a reputed authority in this particular domain (like Neil Patel of QuickSprout) who has quoted something useful and more importantly something that is very relevant to your topic. Quote this authority, but that’s not enough; in order to leverage the maximum potential of the authority’s quote, you need to contact this person on Twitter to inform him/her of the fact that you have used his/her quote. With your tweet, make sure that you provide a link to your post.
Why Twitter?
Well, it offers you a two fold benefit. Firstly, it allows you to contact the concerned person to let him/her know that you have used his/her quote. This improves your credibility. Also, the fact that you have tweeted the link to your post means the follower of his/her twitter account will be tempted to go through your post. This can improve the readership of your blog post, and if these are interested readers who feel strongly about the topic that you have written on, they will post comments.
Share your Post with a Blogger Friend
The first thing that you must do, when you start blogging is look for blogger friends. These are friends who have their own blogs. You need to make it habit to strike up a conversation with them on social media and also through your comments on their blog posts. This will lead to a process of reciprocation, wherein these bloggers would comment on your blog post.
One of the better ways of ensuring a comment from your blogger friends and their readers’ is you sharing the link to your new blog post through twitter or even a Facebook posting. Remember, what you are trying to do is to get as many readers to your blog as possible, and if this can be done by way of attracting the readership of your blogger friends, there is no harm in it, is there? After all, you can only improve your chances of getting comments on your blog, if you can attract as many readers to your blogs as possible.
The 3 Question Approach
This is like a three card trick, and can give you great returns if you get it right. The way it works is like this. When you have a topic in mind, and are creating a structure for the content, you need to integrate three questions in your content.
The difficulty level of these questions should vary and my advice would be to put the simple one first, the medium one somewhere in the middle and the difficult one, right at the end of your blog post. What should the question be about? Well that’s the difficult part. Try to understand the psyche of the reader while they are going through your post. Try to get into the mind of your prospective readers and think about all that they might be thinking about, at that particular time. Ask questions relevant to the content and about the reader’s own experiences.
Taking the example of this blog post, my first pointer is about quoting a well known authority, so if I was to add some question, it would be along the lines of, “Which well known blogging authority do you follow?”; the question is simple to answer, relevant to the topic, and serious readers will be tempted to give their answer.
This approach also has behavioral roots and psychological overtones. It’s pretty simple really, if there is a question, readers will be tempted to answer it. This is common human behavior. So, make use of it.
The Niche Based Approach
I know all of you are going, “But of course I will cater to my niche, that’s obvious”, but wait… this approach is not about catering to your target niche, but more about writing about a niche that your target readers are going to like reading about.
You can begin by identifying all those niches that your target users can like. Once you shortlist these niches, identify those niches that you are comfortable with, from the knowledge and writing perspective. The idea is to write about what the readers like and not about what you want to write about. This will help you attract better readership and consequently more comments.
Remember, a blog is all about its readers. Writing about a particular topic that your readers are interested in reading about is one of the best ways of increasing reader connect with your blog.
Write Content in Series/Parts
If you are reading a story, don’t you want to know how it ends? Or, if you are reading about a particular subject that is divided into different parts, for easy dissemination and also assimilation, don’t you want to go through the second part, if the first part has proven to be useful?
Well, use the same brand of thinking for the content on your blog. By dividing your content into series or parts, you ensure that your readers will keep coming back to your blog. Quite obviously there are a few riders that you need to keep in mind. The first is the fact that your content should be worthwhile. The second is that it should be comprehensive. The third is that it should be a problem solver and address a certain need of your readers. It is only if your content meets these parameters that it should be divided into a series.
Otherwise, your content will just come across something that has been forcefully converted into a series of posts, in spite of their being no earthly justification to do so.
Share your Post in a relevant Blog Community
You might be surprised to know that there are plenty of people out there looking for the more information on the particular topic/subject that you have written about. But, the only thing is that you need to find these people. These people need to come across the link to your blog post.
This is not as difficult as it seems to be. Your potential readership is frequently visiting various blogging communities to search for links to the kind of posts they like. So, become a part of the relevant blogging community like “BlogEngage” (relevant to your specific niche) and share the link to your post. It is a simple as that. Once you get the readers in, the comments will follow.
So here they are…. A few more ways of improving the comments count on your blog post. Your focus should be on improving the readership of your blog and the comments will follow.
I will end this post with a suggestion – keep exploring ways of increasing the readership to your blog and don’t take your readers for a ride… If you have promised them something, you need to deliver that ‘something’ to them.
What other points will you add to this list of ideas?
Let me know if you know any other unique ways of increasing comments on a blog and I might be able to leverage them with some different thoughts.
Image © bloomua – Fotolia.com
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