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If only it were so easy

I sure would.

Not that easy, is it?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was comment fairy to come along and sprinkle magic pixie dust mesmerizing your visitors into sharing deep intimate secrets?

In reality, you can’t even buy the kind of high quality commenting that separates the blogging leaders from the blogging wanna be’s.

What you can do right now: Learn to do better!

Understand that getting comments has a “soft” writing aspect, and a “hard” technical side… and you need to master both.

We’re going to (mostly) look at the technical side of the discussion here. The soft side rapidly strays off into copy writing, a huge topic in it’s own right.

First, let’s take a quick look at the comments you’re currently getting…

How many comments should you have?

Expect about 1% of your traffic to comment. Actually, when you’re starting out, 1% is pretty good for most people.

Here’s a really fast way to compute your comment percentage. Open your “Dashboard” page in the WordPress administration interface. Grab the number of comments, as shown in the screenshot:

Number of comments on blog

Next, find out how many visitors you have using a website statistics program. I use WordPress Stats plugin because it seems the most conservative on average. Here’s a screenshot:

Find total number of visitors

Not bad! A little less than half those comments are mine, and a chunk belongs to Deacon because we comment on each other’s blogs… but that still leaves about 0.5%. Which beats 0% by a long shot.

WordPress comment technology

Here’s four really good commenting technologies. Note that the built in WordPress system is pretty good by itself, and even better with a few plugins such as CommentLuv and Subscribe to Comments.

You have 4 main choices for comment handling technology:

1. Built-in WordPress comments: This is what’s currently used on Website In A Weekend. It seems adequate. One very big question is whether “adequate” is good enough. Would a better commenting system inspire more comments? There’s surely lots of opinions, testing is the only way to find out.

   However, using the WordPress commenting allows using plugins for customizing those comments. You will notice I have the CommentLuv plugin operating now. People seem to like this plugin considerably. I like it!

2. Intense Debate: Tried Intense Debate very briefly on There Is NO Box. Didn’t like the administrative interface at all; I was required to log into my own commenting system. I uninstalled it immediately. However, Intense Debate is officially supported by Automattic, the WordPress folks, and many find it very useful. Try it for yourself and see what you think.
3. Disqus is a comment aggregator, where all your comments live on the Disqus site as well as the blog where you left the comment. This is useful: you can edit comments later. You can also log into Disqus once during browsing session, and you will be logged into every other Disqus-enabled blogs. Very convenient!
4. Echo (nee JS-Kit) has some interesting features, such as real-time updates. You don’t have to refresh your web page to watch comments appear. This is pretty cool. Unlike with Disqus or Intense Debate, the comments do stay with the blog instead of being aggregated elsewhere.

   There is a WordPress plugin available as well.

Make sure to set the comment closure to a reasonable number of days. I recently found that the comments settings on Website In A Weekend were set to close 14 days after publication. That’s too soon for a brand new effort! I reset it to 180 days. This is going to attract more spam, but that’s what Akismet is for after all.

Encouraging comments

Two conditions for encouraging comments are to write compelling calls to action inspiring people to comment, and reducing the technical barrier preventing people from commenting. Writing a call to action can be as simple as just asking people for their opinions.

Any technical barrier to comments will decrease the number of comments you get on your blog. Period. However, when you throw the “commenting gates” wide open, you will end up with thousands of spam comments. I know this from personal and painful experience.

So what to do…?

An excellent question, and a question with no pat answer.

Or perhaps, the only pat answer would be “Experiment until you find what works for you.”

Here’s a few suggestions:

1. Try turning off spam protection intermittently. Make sure you have the time to moderate effectively when you do.
2. Keep spam control such as Akismet, NoSpamNX, and Bad Behavior running, but otherwise throw the doors open. This will decrease but not quite eliminate your need to moderate.
3. Use a Captcha box to help screen out spam. These aren’t very popular, and I don’t care for them myself, but they do work. I like SI Captcha better than any other captcha box I’ve ever used.
4. If you have absolutely no time to moderate, require registration to comment. This will filter out most people, leaving you with only the die hards. Spam will still get caught by Akismet… some people just have too much time on their hands.

In the end, to get a lot of comments, you’re going to have to get a lot of traffic!

Don’t abuse or misuse comments

Matt Mullenweg discusses some ways you can mis-use comments to kill your community.

The upshot: don’t be a jerk.

If you’re just starting out, you probably won’t have enough comments to matter, but the article is worth reading anyway. Matt’s article is a soft sell for Intense Debate as well, which is another reason it’s worth reading!

This should be enough to get you going with comments. Any questions? Leave a comment!

Update: March 23, 2011

Eighteen months makes a big difference in comments, here’s what it looks like now: