Early this month Darren Rowse of Problogger gave several (seven to be exact) suggestions on what to as your readers to get them to be more involved in your blog.
I too find that asking questions can indeed be rewarding because it does encourage even the “lurkers†to come out and participate even if just once in a while. The good thing with getting people to participate is that once a person leaves a comment the chances of that person commenting again increases and you can also bet that they’ll be checking your blog out more often to see if you, or another reader, replied to their comment. Another benefit of having more readers partcipate in your comment section is that from time to time a comments can give you more ideas on what to blog about. If you’ve been stumped for a topic from time to time you know what a big deal this is. Even better, the topic you’ll end up blogging about is already guaranteed to be of interest to your readers.
With that in mind though you need to be sure that you don’t fail when it comes to follow up. If you put effort into getting people to participate you should also put effort into making sure you recognize their effort in turn by moderating comments regularly and replying to their posts. People don’t want to be kept waiting to see their comments get approved, they don’t want to see their comments lumped with spam comments (so delete those that get through!) and they don’t want to be ignored.
Originally posted on December 19, 2009 @ 5:37 pm
