The community that forms around your blog can make or break it, but luckily, YOU can influence that. Start by actively encouraging comments. It can be incredibly simple, and much of it can be automated with some freely available Wordpress plugins.

As valuable as your community is, you must do everything in your power to encourage its formation, and some of that responsibility rests directly with your readers’ ability to comment and add to the discussion. Once they participate, they have a vested interest in the success of your community. That’s why encouraging comments is so essential to your blog’s success. Commenting leads to more involved readers, which leads to more referrals and more engaged readers, which leads to more clicks and more sales.

Regardless of whether your goals for your blog are earning an income or just providing good content to your readers, one of your primary factors of success will be the community that forms around your blog.

Provide a dofollow link in return: a very easy way to encourage a comment is to remove the “nofollow” attribute from your blog’s comments. You’ll see an increase in spam attempts, but it’s worth it to encourage comments.

Commenter highlighting: you can use plugins like “Meet Your Commenters” or “Top Commenters” to provide extra insight and incentive for comment posters.

Highlight your commenters’ posts: plugins like “Comment Luv” provide an automatic link back to the commenter’s latest blog post. This is an ethical bribe: by contributing a comment, your readers can publicize their latest blog entry.

Reward commenters: you can even set up comment thresholds. For each reader who achieves a predetermined number of comments, you can automatically send them a reward: a discount, access to a private post, a free report or e-book, etc. Plugins like “Blog Commentifier” can automate this process for you.

Ask for them: rather than wrapping each post up neatly, leave room for discussion. Ask an open-ended question in closing or ask for comments directly.

Provide a comment RSS feed: blogs all have RSS feeds associated with them so that readers can keep tabs on your blog through their RSS readers. Why not provide them with a comments feed so that they can easily keep tabs on the conversation? Wordpress bloggers can use the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin for this.

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