How to Get Blog Comments: 12 Questions To Ask Yourself

No one comments. How do you get people to comment on your blog? Great content gets shared and commented on. Nearly half the population refuses to do business with companies they don’t trust, and over half choose companies based on trust and recommend trusted companies to friends. You should always go above and beyond to help people out, even when there is nothing in it for you. If you try your best to help people by responding to their emails, people will appreciate it and participate by commenting on your blog. Do you ask for comments? I’d like to think that because I encourage a positive, transparent, and open community, my readers love to share their ideas. For some people, the comments make the article. Do you comment on other blogs?

One of the biggest worries bloggers have is the silent blog syndrome. After putting endless hours of hard work into your blog, you find that it remains silent. No one comments. No one argues. No one praises. It’s a dark and lonely place.

How do you get people to comment on your blog? What tricks, techniques, and powers of persuasion must you possess? A quiet blog can be depressing, while an active blog is exciting. Once people start chiming in, sharing tips, arguing points, and having a conversation, you feel as if your blogging existence has finally been validated.

Getting more blog comments requires patience and consistency but I have provided you with 12 simple questions to ask yourself in order to help you increase comments on your blog with ease.

Answer these 12 simple questions to start getting more comments.

1. Do you have a bad comment system?

Let’s start at the ground floor. Can people easily leave a comment? If not, that’s a problem.

I know there are blogs where I would be willing to leave a comment, but I just can’t do it because of a broken comment system. Maybe the Captcha code isn’t working. Or I’m forced to choose an avatar. Or I have to log in to some system. Or I have to wait for the moderator to approve my comment. Or I don’t even know where to click to leave a comment.

All of these factors are comment killers. Look at your blog commenting process with fresh eyes. Or have someone else look at it, navigate it, and try to leave a comment. Fix any barriers and move on.

A good way to ensure that you don’t have these problems is to stick with basic commenting systems. You don’t need to sign up for any crazy commenting systems. Using the default commenting system that comes with WordPress is good enough.

2. Are you creating insightful content?

The only way to get comments is to get traffic.

And to build sustainable traffic, you need to provide insightful, deep, researched, and well-thought-out content.

This is where everything starts. If your content sucks, you won’t get comments. Period.

When people read your content, they’re basically giving you their money. As you already know, time is money. If readers spend their time/money on your content, they expect to derive some value. Is your content valuable? Is it worth your readers’ time/money?

If it is, they might voice this in the comments. If you’re not providing something of value, people will feel slightly ripped off. They spent this time reading your article but got nothing good from it.

The more value you provide in your content, the better comment interaction you’re going to score. Think of your readers as customers dropping a few dollars in order to read your blog post. What are you going to give them in return?

Only the cream of the crop content sticks out in today’s crowded environment, so you need to write with your A-game.

Focus on creating compelling stories that draw people in and make them want to share an opinion. The best content gets shared, goes viral, attracts audiences, and connects.

Like I said, the content marketing world is crowded. Just take a look:

More and more companies find they need more and more content to sustain revenues and growth. But more and more of everything means that your job as a content creator is more challenging.

How do you stand out?

Great content gets shared and commented on. Boring content gets ignored.

If you’re struggling with a no-comment blog, you may want to explore ways of getting more interesting. Too many passive sentences? No strong verbs? Lack of anecdotes? Dry topics?

Figure it out, and rework your content to make it a bit more exciting. In other words, spice up your writing style. Be personal, clear, and concise.

It’s all about building trust. To build trust, you have to write in a way that communicates authenticity and transparency.

Edelman recently published a report showing the behaviors of consumers based on trust. This data helps to illuminate the importance of being viewed as a trusted resource.

The key to any successful effort is trust, and this is especially true online and in business. Nearly half the population refuses to do business with companies they don’t trust, and over half choose companies based on trust and recommend trusted companies to friends.

BlogHer found that 81% of online consumers trust content from blogs. It’s the new newspaper or magazine.

So, let’s get back to the question: how do you build content that stands out?

You do so by building trust.

And you build trust by providing insight, detail, and facts.

3. Are you creating an emotional connection?

People like talking and communicating with people they feel comfortable around. If you can get people to love you, they’ll want to communicate with you.

Just think of Gary Vaynerchuk. People come up and talk to him all the time because he has a warm and fuzzy personality.

So, how do you create a bond with your readers? Well, you need to open yourself up and help them get to know you. Within your blog sidebar, you should have an image of yourself and a quick bio. Have that bio link to your About page.

On your About page, you need to really open yourself and share your life story. From the good times to the bad ones and everything in between, you should be an open book. For example, in my bio, I talk about how my parents struggled and how it motivated me to do better in life. I go as far as sharing what my future goals are in life.

You’ll also want to show multiple sides of yourself when doing this. The bio in my sidebar as well as the picture that goes along with it are very corporate. But the image on my About page is a goofy cartoon drawing that shows a different side of me.

4. Do you care for people?

You should always go above and beyond to help people out, even when there is nothing in it for you. I’m a big believer that if you help other people, somehow the universe will take care of you.

The biggest way I help people isn’t through comments; it’s by responding to emails. I get hundreds of emails each day, and a good portion of them are from people asking for help. Although I am unable to help everyone, I really do try to help as many people as I can.

What I’ve noticed over the years is that the majority of my commenters are people with whom I’ve interacted through email. When I look at all the people who emailed me from my blog in the last 30 days, 19% of them left a comment on Quick Sprout in the last 30 days. It may not seem like a big percentage, but it adds up over time.

If you try your best to help people by responding to their emails, people will appreciate it and participate by commenting on your blog.

5. Do you have a poor site design?

If someone doesn’t like your site design, sorry, but they’re not going to leave a comment. I know, it sounds cold and heartless, but design really matters to a potential commenter.

My blog is designed to support interaction. Without even reading an entire article, a user can directly click through to the comments.

Beyond that, I make my comment call to action very simple and straightforward:

When you try to stuff a lot of different elements at the end of a blog, you miss the golden moment for capturing a would-be commenter.

Also, you should show the comments that other people left for the new visitors to see. If you are piping in without knowing what’s already in the queued comments, it’s like saying something in the middle of a conversation that you haven’t even been listening to.

Forbes, for example, does a poor job of encouraging comment interaction because of its busy design and a no-show comment stream: