CakeBlast

There are several WordPress plugins available that are designed to encourage visiters to leave comments. I recently added two of these plugins to my blog.

The first plugin that I added is called subscribe to comments. This plug-in allows commenters on my blog to check a box before commenting on an individual post. By checking the box, the commenters will get an e-mail notification when  further comments are posted to that article. This plugin encourages people to comment, because they will know when their comments have been responded to. It also encourages people to return to your blog, because they will know when somebody else has commented on a post they are interested in, and they may want to respond to the comment.

Most people will prefer to subscribe to comments from an individual post, rather than all posts. Subscribing to comments from every post, which is what most blogs offer, causes several problems.  First of all, the reader may not be interested in many of the posts on the blog. Second, subscribing to all comments causes there to be more comments than most of us care to read. Finally, most new comments come from new posts. Even if someone wants to read every post on a blog, most people will not be interested in reading every comment left on every post.

The second plug-in that I added to my blog is called Show Top Commentators. This plugin displays my readers’ names on my page, along with the number of comments and a link to their site. I set mine up to reset monthly, but it can be easily set up to reset according to day, week, month, or never. Best of all, the link doesn’t have a no-follow tag (unless you add one)! That should really encourage commenters by helping my readers increase the page rank of their own pages.

I moderate comments before they are published, so no spam comments will ever get through. This way, only comments that I approve count towards the top-commenter tally. But I will approve most comments if they are not trying to sell me something unrelated to my post. I haven’t set the CSS up completely for the Top Commentator plug-in, but will do that soon. In the meantime, the plug-ins have both been working great, although they haven’t had time to start encouraging comments yet.

Go ahead, leave a comment, and give these plug-ins a try.