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February 20, 2008
Making the most of blog comments: Part 1 - Promoting blog comments
One of the great strengths often cited about the blogosphere is the fact that it is a 'conversation', and the ability to leave comments on individual posts has long been an integral part of that. However, it isn't always clear how to get the most out of the comments left on a site.
With blogging, a lot of the emphasis is on the continual update, the perpetual breathless rush to publish something new. That doesn't leave much space for the considered reflection of what has been posted onto a site by the users.
I started to think about this problem late last year, when there was a sudden flurry of interesting comments on old currybetdotnet articles, and I realised that a lot of my regular readers would never get to see them. I wanted to find a way to make better use of that content, and to alert people to comments I thought were interesting.
Over the next few days I want to look at some of the ways that you can make the most of the comments on your blog. I'll be looking in detail at the pros and cons of implementing a couple of these methods, and tomorrow I'll start publishing the results of a survey I've done across 100 blogs to see what the most popular methods are.
Today, though, I wanted to start with a basic list of all the different ways I've seen people give more exposure to the comments on their blog beyond simply listing them underneath the relevant post.
'Recently commented' list
Some blogs include a list of 'Recent comments' in their left or right-hand navigation columns. Frequently these take the formula 'person' commented on 'post title', and people generally list between 3 and 10 recent comments. This may be a case where it is useful to bear in mind the 7±2 rule when choosing how many recent comments to display.
'Most commented' list
Usually similar in format to the 'recently commented' list, the posts in this list are those which have attracted the most comments over time. When included in a blog's navigation this can serve a dual purpose, as it is likely that the posts that have attracted a lot of comments will also be the busy and popular posts from the archives worth showcasing.
'Most active' list
Although a little harder work to set-up from a template point of view, a 'Most active' post list combines both of the above into one formula. The idea is to display a list of posts that have received a lot of posts recently. This avoids the situation where that one post from 2003 which attracted nearly 100 comments is permanently lodged at the top of the list.
Comment RSS feed
Some bloggers provide a separate RSS feed that contains the most recent comments that have been submitted to the site. A lot of themes for the Wordpress platform provide this functionality out-of-the-box.
Comment feed on a per article basis
Both Wordpress and Blogger provide easy options to produce an RSS feed specific to each individual post on a blog. Users who leave a comment, or who are just interested in the conversation around an individual post, can subscribe in their usual feed reader to follow subsequent comments as they are left.
Combined comment and post feed
It is also possible to generate a mixed feed or 'splice' feeds together, so that people are able to subscribe to an RSS version of a blog that includes both links to articles as they are posted, and to any comments that are being left on the site.
Email subscription
There are plug-ins available for many blogging platforms that allow users to subscribe to an email update whenever a comment is left on a post, or to track responses to a comment they have left via email. In some ways this has an advantage over the RSS feed methods, as more people are familiar with email than with RSS. It also avoids the problem of leaving people with lots of redundant RSS subscriptions once the conversation on a post has died down.
Comment 'index' page
A lot of blogs provide index pages to display multiple views of the same content - by week, by month, by category and so on. A comment index page is a similar listings page, but instead of listing articles and posts, it is a published list of the most recent comments. It allows the user, at a glance, to get an overview of the activity going on across the site.
Editorial round-up post
Another way of bringing interesting comments to the fore is to write a round-up of comments once a week. Or fortnight. Or month. Or however often seems appropriate. This might not suit the style of every blog, and is obviously more manual work, but it does provide a way of highlighting the 'hidden gems', rather than simply foregrounding every comment left on a site.
Which one works for you?
There isn't really a one-size-fits-all solution here. The choice of which method suits you best will be a personal one depending on your audience and blogging style. I tried, for example, to do a couple of 'comment round-up' posts, and found that I struggled to get the tone of them right. As a consequence I didn't publish them.
Another significant factor will be the ratio on a blog between posts and comments. A combined feed of posts and comments works fine if the ratio is something like 3 comments to 1 editorial post. However, if you are regularly attracting lots and lots of comments, your own content might seem swamped in a feed of that style.
Your audience makes a difference too - it isn't much good providing lots of mixed RSS options if you have a very non-technical audience who aren't going to take advantage of them.
Tomorrow...
Tomorrow I'll be looking at a survey I've carried out across 100 blogs, to see what methods they used to promote the content of their comments to their readers.
I use http://co.mments.com/ to track further comments to a blog I commented on. I found out about it from Lifehacker.
I get an RSS of the entries whose comments I've subscribed to. There also seems to be an option for getting them by e-mail.
Paola
Some bonkers formatting at My Right Wing Dad, but interesting how it whacks the new comments right up there above the content in a single post entry.
You make some interesting points here. Currently on my blog I don't do anything to promote comments, and don't often look at them that much. You're right - the need to come up with continual new information can be a rush sometimes. Thanks - you've made me think.
great! this was really helpful!
I like to promote comments. It is also good to know which posts people like commenting on to direct other visitors to your important posts. I think comments are the biggest indicator as to which posts are more popular rather than only visitors to the page.
It's good to see a blogger actually recognise the importance of comments and appreciate that in general they add to the overall blog post and engage your readers. Good tips for including comments in blogs - hopefully more bloggers will foloow your lead.
it's ironic that the blog on how to properly deal with comments has the fewest comments...
I've been struggling with this as well, when is a comment valid. many comments are social interludes saying "hello" or "thanks"... but even those are not without some value.
BTW: Excellent Turing test!
I find the irony to be that this series of posts accounts for 99.9% of the slightly shady comments I get, where there is just enough unique content to make it a 'proper' comment, but it still just seems like a blatant attempt to get a backlink from someone who found the site by typing 'blog comments' into Google. Know what I mean?
Martin - Great Post. There are, as you know, many different ways of enticing comments. In addition to all that you have mentioned above, there are a few plugins that have proven to be great at promoting and enticing people to join the conversation. One is commentluv and the other is keywordluv. You have probably heard of them but if not, check them out. Nice Post.
Yes and it's even more challenging when you are trying to promote a real estate blog. Most posts are so locational that many people are the slightest bit interested. I am trying very hard to come up with interesting spinnets to put on my blog to attract some good commenters.
You made a good point about email, I don't think that RSS is recognised enough globally yet - although it certainly will be in the future.
One thng you could do is set the default for the "subscribe to email responses" as checked, that way most commentors will be notified of replies anyway, and only those who specifically un-check the box will be kept out of the loop.
By the way Martin, you may want to look at your settings, the left hand margin is cutting out the first letter of each word - for me at least.
IE 6.0, XPpro sp2.
Hi Adrian, thanks for that. You are not the first person to point this out, but so far I have been unable to reproduce it on any machine I've used with IE6 on it, so it is a bit of a mystery to me. Well, not much of a mystery, the answer is that I am just a CSS/HTML hack, but it is a mystery how to fix it...
I forgot to invite you all to my blog. Please visit and leave me a few comments.
www.tampa-real-estate-blog dot com
Thanks!
Comments are a very funny thing!
I think that the biggest attribute of showing a comments list is popularity. It shows that your blog is popular enough that people leave comments.
It also invites people who like to get into a conversation and view others thoughts. Draws one in to speak.
But how often on a blog do we read one comment let alone all the comments? I know I only read comments when I am really involved in the topic and want or desire other points of view.
Many times I will actually skip the comments and just write my thoughts on the post, nothing else.
From a marketing perspective, the subscribe to comments is a great benefit.
From an SEO perspective, comments keep the crawlers coming back.
At the end of the day, comments overall are another form of marketing... the more you have, the more popular you become.
My two cents... Cheers, Chris.
@Chris, it's easy to scan a few comments to judge the quality and determine whether it's worth staying to read them.
For some blogs, I always read the comments on posts I'm interested in. On Lifehacker, for example, because readers usually have more tips.
I read comments and notes on Flickr photos.
Whenever I leave a comment, I always subscribe to and read future comments.
And I've become pen-pals with a dieter who is keeping a weight-loss blog - I'm reading all the comments on it, even on posts I haven't commented on.
And some sites I frequent, like Upcoming.org, I don't bother with the comments, probably because it's not a blog and that changes the nature of the comments.
Comments might be a metric of success but they are not marketing because the 'seller' doesn't originate them; comments are a dialog and community-building mechanism.
Martin
Don't know if this helps, but the further down the page the comments extend, the further to the left each new comment is offset. The effect doesn't occur in Firefox. (Not for me anyway!)
Back to the topic:
I think we are verging on semantics when we get down to discussing whether comments are 'marketing' or not.
Surely the point is that comments add original content, which is a)good for the reader and good for Google.
To generate more comments, write provocative opening posts and make sure that the ensuing comments are well moderated. Hopefully a meaningful discussion - one with substance - will ensue.
Although, presumably it helps if you can actually see all the comments :-(
"I find the irony to be that this series of posts accounts for 99.9% of the slightly shady comments I get"
Martin I know you must feel that everybody that comes to this post is looking for the back link and I can tell you that you are totally right.
The thing is some come right out and show you what they are doing and those that act really nice and subtle with the classical ohh Martin I love you post so much and I bet you most never even read your post.
Now the typical blogger that comes and says the ohh Martin comment comes from the school of the A-listers where they teach to comment spam the hell out every blog as quick as possible like Caroline Middlebrook the "Comment Queen" but in reality if you see her comments 90% are the clasic ohh MArtin what a great post I learned so much.
Then comes me the guy who is looking for high ranking post where I can comment and hopefully get an anchor link with one of my main keywords but I am more then willing to work my behind of for that on link by providing as much content as I can to you post hence returning the juice your post will pass to my site and at the same time also get you in good graces with Google by giving your post fresh content which you will be rewarded with again more juice and a move in the SERPS up.
Martin you see this in blogging about blogs and MMO's if your blog post was about politics or sports etc etc this "Spam effect" would greatly be reduced as the avg Joe has no idea what an anchor link or Page Rank is.
Vic
The thing is Vic, I don't mind people coming here for the backlink - I'm a 'dofollow' kind of guy. What I appreciate is if they actually contribute something to the page, and then don't blatantly sign the post "Buy yr meds from my spammy site" with the URL spammy-drugs-site.com
When people do that, I reserve the right to change the anchor text to the link to something that more reflects the idea of leaving a signed comment than leaving a 'text advert'. As you'll appreciate yourself...
We use a Wordpress blog on our site and have gotten into the habit of only allowing comments on certain posts. We write some posts to interact with readers, and others just for SEO.
I do not know if anyone else has this experience, but I have been reading more and more about comments diluting the posts by lowering keyword relevance.
Not sure this is something I should even worry about, any thoughts?
I like to RSS my comments because the are helpful when trying to get traffic to my blogs from social sites. When comments get update on my blog, the rss feed is updated, hince everyone in my network get the update and can respond.
Heh, you're right there Martin. :-)
Well there's no doubt that commentors are appearing here in order to avail themselves of the dofollow link, but look at the effect it has: would Martin attract as many comments if his blog were nofollow?
Furthermore as Martin says, he has full control over which posts he allows or edits so I don't see the problem. Martin gets extra content, commentors get a backlink, Google provides a better service to its searchers - it's a win/win/win situation.
I don't run a blog myself but if I did it would be dofollow. It's a no-brainer - to me at least!
Hello, intersting article but my english isnt well. can i translate ur text into german? im interst reading ur information about promoting my blog. which translator is the best. plz dont say google :D
I am new here and wanted to say that I think Adrian has made an excellent point. I think that allowing others the opportunity of possibly obtaining a backlink does help promote the site. And in turn, while it will likely be necessary to filter out comments of little or no value, this will always lead to unique and well thought out user generated content.
Many people put "top commentor" on their blogs to promote comments. Since there are so many competitive people who would post and post garbage just to see their name on a blogroll list, I think it is a bad idea.
Ironically, the continual update also reflects to individual blogposts also. I recently saw a real estate SEO competition where the blogger picked a fight with the competition creator. With minimal links to the blog (an authority blog but still) but with almost 300 comments in it. Of course she managed to add fuel to the fire for the whole competition long. She ended up being #2 for the keyword which was a great achievement on her end. Refreshing content applies to multiple levels of a blog is my point.
Well a good way to encourage commenting, is making a guess blog post from a famous blogger, and getting all his fans on your blog...that would double the effectivity...also u can do the same favor for him on your blog. Also make sure that commenting is easy on your blog, and not a headache...ofcourse while getting rid of spammers.
Hi Martin! Nice Article, very nice. I got 2 further ideas for promoting blog comments.
1. All comments are optical the same, but not in a contentswise matter of view. U know wikiasearch on re.search.wikia.com/search.html#seo ?
Lets imagine user could bring up there comments in blogposts like on wikia? U could possible even highlight comments and give a star rating .
2. Lets put a stopwatch under your article and countdown till close of comments. User must hurry to comment, because comments function will close within a specified time limit.
Nice Post about comments, in my blog I appreciate my user to comment, too. But they I not using it much sometimes just one post comments. I thank your advice I hope if I integrate some my users keep more track of them.
Yes, depending on how tech savvy an industry is, users may or may not understand the reciprocity principle in blogging and commenting.
I appreciate the dofollow plugin which sites like this one use, and other plugins like keywordluv goes a step further, all to encourage good participation, adding content to a blog and its value. And reciprocally, the genuine participant/commenter gets a link back to their own site.
Sure there are possible abusers out there that spam manually or via robot-scripts, but hopefully the anti-spam plugins we use as well as basic human moderation will easily take care of those problems. In my opinion, using nofollow is the lazy/uninformed way to deal with spam and misses out on a lot of potential good comments.
Keep up the good work! =)
When commenting goes right, it almost like it turns the blog into a forum, which is pretty cool.
In my limited experience, I'd say the email thing works great. I've only commented on a few blogs that used it, but getting repeatedly emailed has got me to visit those blogs over and over.
Also, if you go to Andy Beard's blog, andybeard.eu, he has some cool comment plugins. For example, comments are rated, and if you put your cursor over the commentors name, it shows other comments they've made.
Just a reminder of the house rules. I am happy to publish comments, and always happy to give backlinks to your site which are 'dofollow' if you comment. I only ask two things:
1) Please write something that adds to the debate, rather than 'Nice post, dude, I, like, so totally agree'
2) Don't sign off your comment 'Play online casino and win a video of Britney using anti-obesity drugs' simply to get your anchor-text keywords in, because I won't publish it. If you do, I'll either not publish the comment, or I'll instead change your name to minor characters from Doctor Who or something, depending on what kind of mood I'm in...
I like the idea of an Editorial round-up post every now and then. Whenever someone makes a comment that really inspires you to write more you can create a post around that comment and give the commentor a nice in content link for bringing that value to your blog.
"When commenting goes right, it almost like it turns the blog into a forum" - I think Wordpress realised that and it gave them the inspiration for their BBpress forum software.
yes sometime i also faced the same situation but i don't mind as long as the comments are very genuine and constructive
I have pretty much given up on comments on my dog blog, but the more I think about it, I am losing out on a lot of community interaction. This post has helped me rethink allowing comments and even encouraging them.
Martin,
In addition to helping promote the comments on previous posts, do you find that this also helps with creating more fresh content for posts?
Part of the related post plug in helps to get vistors to previous posts, but it can also help with SEO on the most current post.
Have you found that it helped you in any way?
Matt
Hi Matt, I can only really think of one occasion off-hand where comments on one post got me writing a whole new post much late.
What I do like about comments getting added to older entries is that push them back into my 'Recently comments' list on the side-bar of every page, which brings them back around to Google's attention when they crawl the site.
nice formats for various comments. I actually like the related posts plug. It keeps people in your site. ell, it works on me for sites I visit.
I think the dofollow is a good movement. It encourages people to make useful comments but on the other hand also attracts spam.
There is nothing like a good discussion with lots of comments. For me i enjoy reading, learning from other people and generally don't post much.
I understand the importance of exposing your more popular posts to reader but sometimes it's just hard to find the best way. Up to now I have been using Recent Comments. For a while I used a Google Analytics plugin that listed most visited posts, but it kept breaking on me. It also had a tendency of staying the same 7 links over time and rarely changing. Another option I found was the Popularity Contest plugin, but it takes some work to set up all the variables. You can tweak the weight of comments, page loads, trackbacks, etc. to build a custom popular posts widgets.
Regarding the do follow and commenting, one thing I think bloggers sometimes don't realize is that comments all add fresh content to the post. and Google loves fresh comments...it is a fine balance to manage a post and make sure that it doesn't become a spam haven but the way I see it, for those who are going to post relavent comments helps the blogger with content, and pinging. We can also do some to help the blog, as well as ourselves by bookmarking the post too. the more links we can help the post with, the more juice it can build up, and the more we all benefit.
thank you Martin for being so generous with us all.
As a reader, I don't get much out of the Top Commenter or Recent Comments widgets. But they are nice as a commenter. As a publisher, I had not thought of their use as a Google bait for older entries so that was a nice tip.
As for reading comments, it all matters on why I am there in the first place. If I am looking to solve a problem, I will definitely read the comments as that is usually where the solution is. If I am just commenting on a lifestyle post, I will generally just skim the comments.
Good post on blog comments. An excellent read with some nice commentary!
It would be nice to see the change in comment traffic with each different format of comment summary ie with a the most active list, I would have thought that the busy threads become even busier, and the quiet threads dissapear almost daily!
I think promoting your own blog is something very important. Most bloggers just post articles and forget about promoting their own blog.
If you're interested in conspiracy theories, you can also visit my blog.
I find that recent comments or mosted commented on pluging helps find some direction when i visit a new blog for the first little while. If the readers tend to comment more on somthing it gives me a better idea on what the blog is about. It helps me find the information I am looking for.
Martin, thanks for sharing this info, I'm a fairly newbie to blogging and just the tip on including 'recent comments' on my sidebar of my blog is great - I'll start that!
thanks! Tammy
These will be great additions to my blog. Thanks for sharing!
I'm glad I found your post on this topic, as I've been thinking about ways to promote the best posts my blog has to offer. I see a lot of great ideas on the subject.
I know that some of the blogs that I follow will list their best posts (manually for the most part).. but I see you have listed several different approaches. One of these days I'll play around a bit and see what works best for my site. Thanks!
Thanks for the useful post, and debate in the comments. There are pros and cons to KeywordLuv and CommentLuv. For me, CommentLuv has a slight advantage as it provides a deep-link to a blog post, as well as a general link to the homepage. Assuming you have keywords in your post-titles, you get the best of both.