Join the Conversation – How to Attract More Comments on Your Blog Posts

A blog has transitioned into a useful business tool. Gone are the days when blogs were only considered for fun and private use to express feelings or share things such as pictures and recipes. 

Blogging has evolved to become an instrumental method of conducting business as it can be used as the real-time way in which a business gets recent, relevant, and up-to-date information out to its target audience.

This is why law firms have found that using blogs to focus on and highlight key issues help retain clients and draw in new ones at the same time. 

One challenge in maintaining a successful blog is ensuring engaging interactions to keep the content dynamic.

The fact is, the web got much faster. No one has time anymore to pause and comment on your blog. Everyone has their own feeds where they would rather spend time commenting on friends’ and followers’ updates and interacting.

Getting readers to comment on your blog has become incredibly challenging.

Collaborate with Your Peers

One of the best ways to get more people to comment on your blog is to ask those past readers and peers with whom you have or had a good relationship. 

This can be done by sending DMs and emails and letting them know you’d appreciate some comments from friends about any issue relevant to them. 

This will get comments started, and then you will find that more people post as they tend to follow what others do on a blog.

Don’t just stop there: If your friends and fellows decide to visit your blog and comment, reach out again and invite them to set up a collaboration group (on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, or Slack) where you can all comment on one another’s articles.

This will be useful for everyone involved and will keep interactions coming.

Trying to do everything alone is one of the biggest blogging mistakes. It is incredibly discouraging and limiting. Always look for micro-groups to join and set up your own. We are stronger when we are together!

Ask Questions

Creating content answering popular questions is a great way to invite more answers from readers.

Ask your question in the page title and H1 heading and answer it in the content. This will also likely improve your click-through from organic search results: I’ve found question-type titles are highly clickable.

Keyword research is a great way to find popular questions to answer in your content. Simply run your target keyword and filter your keyword list by a question word (“how,” “why,” “what”). SE Ranking keyword tool is my favorite way to find popular questions for blog content inspiration:

Invite Readers to Comment

One way to promote blog commenting is to pose questions and ask others to comment. Some may think this is a common sense approach; however, those easy-to-implement ideas often get overlooked even though they truly do work. 

Just ask for comments.

Create a clearly visible button, “Comment” to encourage discussions. Many blogs make it very hard to figure out if they even support comments. This will have a domino effect of sorts and trigger more people to chime in, and thus, the commenting per post will generate itself over a short period.

Offer a “Subscribe to New Comments” Option

Getting people to come back and reply to other people’s comments is a great way to keep those conversations going. It is also a huge incentive for readers to comment as they will want to participate in real conversations.

Therefore, make sure to offer your commenters an option to subscribe to new comments for them to get notified when new conversations are being posted. You can do that through a plugin that is easy to install and integrate with native WordPress comments.

Use Viral Content Bee

Viral Content Bee (a platform that I own) has just introduced a new feature allowing users to request comments on their blog posts.

It is a brand-new feature that allows you to easily generate discussions on your blog without reaching out to your friends and peers again. Also, it is free.

Cover Trending Topics

People seem to be much more willing to share their thoughts or reply to other people’s comments when something is trending (see this post about ChatGPT). Therefore covering trending and seasonal content can drive much more engagement (shares and comments).

To make seasonality and trends part of your editorial calendar, keep an eye on Twitter and popular blogs in your niche to be able to create content whenever anything goes hot. Additionally, include seasonality in your editorial calendar. Check with Google Trends to be able to find yearly recurring trends and to be able to time your content better:

Build up Your Email List

Focus on building your email list. Email subscribers tend to be more involved because they already know you and your site, so they are more likely to post comments and foster further interactions with readers.

Email marketing is a wonderful way to stay in touch with your readers for later conversions. Including forms on your blog’s sidebar or below new posts will prompt visitors to subscribe. There are quite a few email marketing platforms allowing you to set up automation and send emails any time you publish a new blog post.

Remember, you need to provide enough value and quality that readers would feel like they’re missing out if they weren’t receiving your regular emails. A standard way to increase subscribers is to provide something of value in exchange like a free guide users can download after they sign up. The most important part about your email list is that you own it.

Conclusion

The key to a great blog is conversation. No wonder a well-commented article is a true blogging triumph for many people. You need people to participate in your blog’s life, contribute fresh ideas, ask and answer questions, etc. It is also highly motivational and will help you never feel a burnout. 

Blog comments motivate writers, help them better understand their audience (and for businesses, help create reader and customer personas), inspire with more content ideas, make your blog pages fresher and encourage search engines to reindex them…

An important note to make here is that you must moderate comments carefully to ensure your readers are not shocked by spam.

Blogging is a truly real-time method of generating interest in your business, building a community and driving traffic and conversions. It is less effective if you use it only for broadcasting your thoughts. Blogging is much more effective when it is an on-going conversation with your target audience!

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Blog Cover Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash