Every blog comes with comments and pretty much every blogger is basing their success on comments. Sure, they may say they don’t, but when you have no comments you feel like you’re just talking to yourself. So how do you get comments?

1 - Write posts that are conversational and something that people can relate to. If you write posts in a way that there feels like there is no room for discussion, then comments will be harder to get.

My wife is great at making posts people can relate to. She put out a post two years ago when she broke her leg and is closing in on 1000 comments from others that have broken theirs. She’s not a marketer, or a PR person, just an average blogger who happened to write in a way that people felt compelled to comment.

2 - Invite comments. If you put out a top ten post, or go off on a rant, ask uses what they think. Literally put at the end of the post “Do you agree?”, “Do you have any tips to add?” or other questions that are inviting comments.

I just got done posting a comment on David Naylor’s blog and I’d like to stay involved with the conversation, however there is no ability to say connected via email or feed. This then disconnects the commenter’s from the discussion unless they remember to come back.

A quick fix would be to enable comment notifications. Wordpress has a great plugin called Subscribe to Comments which will allow all readers to subscribe to any post. If you subscribe to a post’s comments, you’ll get notified via email when a new response has been added. This is great if you asked a question or made a comment that someone else responds to. It also brings the visitor back to your blog to where they might participate in more discussions.

Lets not forget that post comments can help a posts rankings/visibility. All comment text is indexable and will work for the post. A good comment discussion can possibly help increase the rankings and visibility.

Did you also know that in Wordpress, each post has it’s own feed for comments? Bringing this out into the open gives users the ability to subscribe in their favorite feed reader and not their email box. Simply add /feed/ after most Wordpress URLs and you should end up with the posts comment feed. This is how I’m staying connected to the post on David’s site.