How to Leverage First Time Commenters into Loyal Community Members
First and foremost I’d like to say that the FamousBloggers commenting folder is just a real goldmine. If you haven’t checked that out, I recommend you do so now as you will really find a lot of good information not just in posts, but also with the enormous amount of comments and feedback.
Because of reading that, I realized that there really isn’t an article about commenting that covers the benefit from the side of those who receive comments from other people. Most of the articles, if not all, are about us, doing commenting and how we can benefit from it. So for this post I just thought it would make a lot of sense to create an article that would tackle commenting from the other side of the fence.
Most of us bloggers get excited when they see some comments in their blog posts. From the early days, up to where we are now. It’s just the same, we tend to appreciate it a lot and as a way to show, we return the favor.
But how can we really maximize it? Is it just all about returning the favor by commenting back on their blog? In this post, I aim to share to you guys the technique that I use to leverage first time commenters into potential long-time loyal community readers.
It’s still about the funnel
If you’ve been blogging or in online business for a while, Im sure you have already heard the funnel. Basically the concept is nothing revolutionary. A blogger gets readers by providing good content, then that blogger would invite his/her reader to sign up to his mailing list, then the blogger will still continue building good relationship by stuffing his readers with good value and later down the road, the blogger will start selling something to his readers.
That’s the simplest way to look into it but it’s more complicated than ever. I’m sure each and every blogger/marketer has their own variations of it but for the sake of this post, I just illustrated it in the simplest way I could.
Someone left a comment what’s next?
When someone leaves a comment to our blog, its either its a comment from someone who’s been reading our blog for quite sometime or it’s from new commenter. These are two different audience right there and so two different actions are needed. Either way, these are the standard things that you must do regardless of whether their new or old:
- Respond to them – This is very important because it easily makes them feel they’re part of the community and they belong. To be honest, I don’t have that much time to reply to all comments in my blog but I try to do so. It’s an important step regardless of the type of audience.
- Do it as soon as possible – Again, these days its hard for me to do this because of a hectic schedule but back then what I try to do is reply back as fast as I could. Glen Allsop from ViperChill even recommends us to stay for at least 30 minutes after publishing our post in front of our computer to try to anticipate comments and respond back in a timely manner.
Funneling new readers to loyal ones
Now let’s be more targeted to new readers or first time commenters. It doesn’t really differ that much from trying to convince a new audience to stay in our blog for a longer time but since our topic is about commenting, I may as well just try to be super specific on that. So here are the exact steps on how I try to turn first time commenters to long-time loyal readers (chronological):
1. Comment Back on their blog
This is an obvious initial step that one must always do. As I’ve said with last post, it all starts out with the small things and working that up with the bigger stuffs.
70% of those who comment on your blog are bloggers as well (some are marketers who link to their product), so its important and imperative for us to show reciprocity by commenting back on their blog. That way they would feel more inclined to come back to our blog once more and make a comment again!
2. Follow that up by hitting them with a personal email
This is the second thing to do if you want to take your connection together to a higher level. For me, I usually first let ourselves engage into some exchange of comments on our blogs before doing this. It’s important not to rush on this thing and try to build that initial conversation first before sending out an email.
I know a lot of bloggers use a certain plugin for emailing first time commenters but I’d rather do it personally or have someone send out a personalized email (outsource). The problem with these plugins is that it’s pretty obvious and they are way too generic. Oftentimes, the welcome message just ends up in the spam folder which ruins everything.
3. Get them to read your best stuffs
Not a lot of people do this but if you do, I guarantee that you’ll be ahead of 90% of bloggers not doing this. Before this, we talked about emailing them. In that email what I usually do is give them a link to my blog’s best posts page or more professionally known as landing page.
Note: Just to clarify, a blog’s landing page is a page where you present your best content to them. It’s also a page where you give them hundreds of reason why they should subscribe or even just read your blog. I talked extensively about it in my blog in my post entitled “How a landing page can increase your blog traffic” and if you’re not aware of blog’s landing page then I highly recommend you to check it out.
Getting them to read your best posts work for couple of things. First, is that they’ll stay in your blog for more in comparison when they just landed in your homepage and saw some posts that aren’t that interesting to them. In your landing page, they can see your best work and there’s a good chance that they’ll visit at least 3 of your posts and read them.
Second is that you’re giving them a good reason why they should follow you. If you’re blogging about a certain topic and they see that you’re writing good articles within your expertise, then they would easily realize they’re in good hands.
It’s an equally a good tool too to filter out audience who doesn’t suit our topic. By having a landing page we’re letting the right people come in and filter out those who may not be right for our niche.
4. Get them to your newsletter
You can now start leveraging what you can offer to them by letting them subscribe to your newsletter. Having a newsletter is very important because with that you can expand your communication medium to your readers more.
A good “not new” way of getting them to subscribe to your mailing list is to bribe them. Offer something for free and if they like it there’s a good chance they’ll be on your list forever. Getting them to your newsletter depends on you and on how you want to implement that strategy.
5. Partner with them
Now we’re at the latter part of the funnel. To be quite honest, partnering with them is an endless opportunity. You can either offer them something, do joint venture, sell them something, engage yourself in reciprocal activities, hold contests together or just about everything. You see, there’s really a ton of opportunities waiting for everyone if only we can cultivate those small things and build it to the bigger things.
I’m sure it’s nearly impossible to convince everyone to be a part of your community for the long haul but by doing all the things I mentioned above, you’re making a huge headway against everybody else. Doing these 5 things is definitely better than just waiting for trickle and trickle of new readers and expecting that seeing your blog alone is enough for them to read you for the longer term.
How about you?
How do you cater to the new members of your community? Do you welcome them elegantly or you just let them walk away? As always, I would love to hear your 2 cents about this.
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