How to Get More People to Respond to Your Articles
Posted on 09. Nov, 2008 by Julius.
Bloggers often feel the need to get a lot of people to write comments on their web site. Of course every person is happy if someone writes something nice like “Nice article! Keep up the good work!” It gives the tremendous amount of work you’ve put into your blog a sense. It makes it seem like the hard work was worth it.
How do you get people to leave more comments on your blog? There are several approaches to receive more comments all of which I will be explaining.
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Be Social
Be social! Reciprocation says that if you are nice to people, people will be nice to you. Treat people the way you want to be treated. It is that simple.
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Listen and Respond
Listening and responding to people commenting on your blog is one of the most important aspect of getting more people to comment. When people are responding on your blog they are doing you a favor! They are trying to communicate with you. If you don’t listen or respond to them they are not going to leave more comments because they think you do not value them anyway.
It happens a lot to me. I leave comments on other people’s blogs but nobody responds to me. It makes me feel like the blog owner does not care about me and because of that I do not feel the need to comment on that blog again.
Of course you cannot expect that well-known bloggers like Darren Rowse reply to your comment. -
Get To Know Your Readers
This is directly linked to the previous point. Through listening and responding you get to know your followers and that is what blogging is all about. It is pretty clear that friends are more open to posting comments and of course more willing to do it often. The reason behind this is that people do not see you as a competitor when they know you, they see you as a friend.
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Ask Questions
People are more likely to write a reply if they know what to write about. When you ask a question you make people think about a certain aspect and you give them a possibility to share their opinion. Further you also engage them in the conversation.
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Quote Them
Quoting your followers is important as it establishes a deeper relationship with your readers. Further it shows your followers that you value them because you listen to them. I quoted one of my commenters in the article From Pagerank 0 to Pagerank 3 in Less Than a Month and it was actually him that helped me reach Pagerank 3.
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Leave Comments on Their Blogs
After having established a relationship with your readers, you should show them that you really care about them. And guess what … there is no better to show this by commenting on their blog.
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Handle Negative Comments
Handling negative comments is probably one of the most difficult things to do but it is also one of the most important. When negative comments are posted on blogs the blog owner tend to go in defense. In Tips for Entrecarders one guy was very upset because I wrote a negative comment about one of his posts. Through responding to his comment I became more aware of the points he was trying to make and it helped me turn his negative comment into a positive one.
There are of course a lot more ways to increase the responsiveness of your followers but these are the ones I came up with.
What do you think is an important aspect?
