Encouraging Visitors To Return To Your Blog Via Commenting
If you’re using WordPress and allow your blog visitors to comment on blog posts, here’s an excellent 5 minute blog marketing tweak to encourage repeat patronage.
Simply allow your visitors to subscribe to the post they’ve just commented on. When anyone else posts an additional comment, the visitors that are “subscribed” will then receive an instant email notification encouraging them to come back and check out the new comment.
Basically what you’re doing is creating a miniature decentralized discussion forum platform on each for your blog posts. It will help to foster a community around your blog by encouraging active blog commenters back and to remain engaged in the expanding dialog.
This also has the additional advantage of adding more and more unique content to your blog posts – content that you don’t have to spend time producing (although on the flip side it does require moderating).
Fortunately some smart cookie (and no, not me this time) has created a nice little WordPress Plugin called “Subscribe To Comments”. Here’s the short description…
“Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!”
The plugin is very simple to install, setup and is worth a look.
A few words of advice however.
You will need to ensure you’re moderating your blog comments – if spammers get in there and make posts to threads that other real people are subscribed to it’s going to upset them and have the opposite effect that we’re trying to achieve.
We’re trying to keep them “engaged” with our blogs… NOT become “enraged” with them.
Allowing your blog visitors to become actively engaged in discussions on each post you make might not be suitable for your own blog marketing goals and what you’re trying to achieve. Ultimately only you can evaluate that, and giving it a test run isn’t going to hurt long term if it doesn’t work out as expected.
More Information / Download “Subscribe To Comments” here.
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Thanks for this Duncan, getting people to leave comments is ‘hard work’ even when you ask leading questions to try and elicit a reply. I will put this plugin to good use and see if it improves anything.
Thanks Duncan. I’ll use that wheeze right away. Is there any particular URL that is more suitable for a blog? – I have mine in the root URL/blog. My home page is for selling my services, so I don’t really want it there.