How to Build your Blog Community
One of the most powerful aspects of a blog is the community that forms around it. Think about it: your readers help YOU build your blog. They provide content ideas, bring new readers on board, initiate discussion. Your readers are responsible for taking your message and spreading it far and wide.
So it makes sense that you encourage that community however you can. How do you do that? How do you turn readers into contributors?
It's simple . . . you get them to participate. That's it. 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.
Think about it. If you read a blog post on a random blog, how likely are you to go back and reread that same post?
Right, not very likely.
But what if you add a comment to the post -- how likely are you to revisit that post?
Probably VERY likely. You want to see what others said in response to your comment. You want to see what kind of conversation forms.
Guess what? Each visit you make to that blog increases your identification with that blog and gives the blog owner another chance to "sell" you. Maybe it's just a click, a new ad rotation, who knows. But that single comment increases that blog's value (a comment is content, after all) and profitability.
If you want your blog to be successful, encouraging blog comments however possible is a wise idea. The community that builds around your blog consists of exactly the kinds of readers that will make your blog profitable. Encourage and nurture comments every opportunity you get. The conversations that occur in comments often turn out to be more valuable than the blog posts themselves, as these conversations might consist of other experts from around the web and the resources they recommend.
Each of the below plug-ins encourages commenting in one way or another. Use them! But use them wisely. These types of plug-ins can also be very resource intensive, as many involve writing to your database.
Subscribe to Comments: enables a reader to sign up for an RSS feed for a specific post's comments, so that they can track a conversation. Especially handy for readers participating in the conversation, as they can track responses to their comments remotely. If readers aren't using a Firefox plug-in like Commentful, Subscribe to Comments is very handy.
Comment Luv: automatically posts a link back to the commenter's latest blog post, giving them an ethical bribe to comment on your blog.
WP-Gravatar: uses readers' avatars from Gravatar, MyBlogLog, or OpenAvatar, and associates readers' comments with their avatars. Great way to build a community!
Blog Commentifier: part of the Six-Figure Plug-in Suite, this plug-in encourages and rewards frequent comments by allowing you to specify comment thresholds that, when met, result in automatic rewards being delivered to your most frequent commenters.
Collapsible Comments: if you start receiving many comments (20 or more) on your blog posts, using this plug-in will help reduce the clutter and make your comments easier to scan.
Meet Your Commenters: I haven't yet decided if I like this plug-in, or if I feel that it's too intrusive. Meet your Commenters will attempt to locate other web properties owned by a commenter and display links to it.
