Comments on your recent work or a guest post are the quickest and probably one of the most reliable ways of gauging your readers reaction. Most of the sites that belong to the readers of this site accept comments and encourage them.

I love the readers of this site, it really feels like a proper community on here and to quote Heather ”Nice to see so much of our little family”, it really does feel like a gathering of friends on here and as such it creates real value to the individual posts and to the site as a whole.

Comments bring traffic which in turn brings more comments;

  • Help

Provide as much help as you can to each of the readers that contribute and reply to everything (within reason) if someone asks a question answer it, ask questions yourself. By doing all this you encourage conversation between you and your readers, which in turn will encourage conversation between readers and other readers.

I get a lot of my motivation from the readers of this site which is all down to the comments. If you look at the amount of comments that have been published on this site 3,533 at the time of writing, but looking at Karen’s guest post which has actually showing only 12 comments have been made, you would think there maybe a bug in my comments system. WordPress is only showing 12 ‘original’ comments if you like, the rest totalling 39 comments at the time of writing are replies.

  • Love

Conversation and debate create a lot of comments, but by showing the love for those comments you create a friendly atmosphere for people to leave a comment and engage in the debate, no matter how intense it is. I very rarely comment on a guest post that’s on this site, mostly down to me wanting the guest poster to get maximum benefit from it, but if I’m honest there is no need for me to get involved as the guest poster and the readers of that post know they can comment and get a reply.

This may seem a little wishy washy, a bit too true hugger, but by creating a loving environment for your readers in the comments section, you can really up your chances of getting a lot of comments every month. As I said at the start comments bring traffic, traffic brings more comments, it’s a great cycle to be in.

Quick one if you are wondering how comments bring traffic, most of the time someone who comments will spread your content for you using social media, not always, but most of the time. By commenting they are engaged in your site and more likely to tell others about it.

  • Benefit

Another way of creating a mini forum at the end of each of your posts is to give them some benefit. Commentluv, if you are not using this then (in my opinion) you’re missing out big time. Commentluv is the plugin which lets you leave a link back to your site when you comment on this post. A lot of sites use disqus to allow comments etc, now I maybe wrong here, but I have never seen a disqus comment space that allows a visible post link with your comment, something in which people can read and think ‘cool title’. Although I’m not sure if the two can be used together.

On this site you will see the top ten commenters too, I’m actually thinking of increasing this to the top 15 because so many people have contributed so many times, but just look at how many times those people have commented, they get links to their site everytime.

Readers who take the time to add value to your content deserve some benefit, so you should give it to them in bags.

You are nothing without your readers and as such you need to look after them. They in turn will look after each other which creates a community. Sure you will get people disagreeing but good ‘usually’ comes out of that.

Friends 002
Creative Commons License photo credit: Narkin S.

Have you got a forum-like community on your site?

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