Monday, August 8, 2011

Ways To Encourage Blog Participation

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For every new blogger, it is discouraging to see the readers participating less in general discussions on the blog. Blogs are the best way to generate traffic for your website. Hence, user interaction is necessary and should not go unnoticed. Some simple ways might help you in providing the users with some extra incentives so that they may participate more in your blog.
1) Make it easier for your readers to comment on your blogs. There are some blogs that ask the readers to sign up before they comment. Though, this takes only a minute or so but can act as the main barrier. Doing this is sometimes and irritating and the readers might avoid commenting at all. Most of the blogs that ask for a registration are looking forward to avoid spam. Now, there are a lot of automated tools that help you remove spam.
2) The second thing to keep in mind is the topic that you choose for your blog and the conclusion. Choose a top of your interest and gather the latest information about it so that you can connect with the readers. Also consider ending with a question or a query that the readers might be interested to answer. The content of your blog is very important as it defines whether your readers will be interested or not.
3) Include a link on your blog to your RSS comments feed in addition to your RSS posts feed. Be sure to update the head region of your HTML to include the comments feed as well. In WordPress, this can be done by modifying the header.php file of your current theme to include the line highlighted in red below.
4) Your readers should also be rewarded for their comments. You can announce a list for the best commentators and you may provide them with some special deals and offers. You can also include the website URL that the commentators left while commenting. You can include the URL in the top commentators list. In WordPress, this can be done easily with the Show Top Commentators plug-in. Those utilizing WordPress Widgets can make use of the My Top Commentators plug-in.
5) The last and the best thing you can do is to send an e-mail to your readers whenever a new comment is posted on your blog. Doing this too much might annoy the readers. Make sure they get e-mails related to the posts they commented on. This can be done easily in WordPress with the Subscribe to Comments plug-in.
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