Can visitors comment easily on your blog?
"No comment!"
[This post is part of the Fuel Feedback series]
Bloggers build community around their ideas.
And while some niches might lend themselves more fruitfully to comments, such as those that involve political debate, controversy, product evangelism, or cats, others take more effort to get the community interacting.
With so many other ways to interact with content, such as RT’ing content on Twitter, liking something on Facebook, and giving something a +1 on Google+, it’s no wonder a lot of bloggers are experiencing a lull in their comment activity.
Another reason you may not be getting the wealth of comments your content deserves is because you’re not making it easy for your readers to comment on your blog. Do you require a login in order to comment? Is your comment section buried below ads and email sign up forms and more ads and ebook offers and social links and related content?
You may be making it difficult to comment on your blog.
I want to post a comment on your blog
I want to go further for you and offer you some direct feedback about whether or not your visitors can post comments easily.
Share a link to your blog and I’ll take a look around, focusing my attention on your comments section. I’ll provide those that share a link to their blog with some feedback in my reply to your comment on this post.
See how this works in some of the other Fuel Feedback posts.
So whether you’re new to blogging and just want some comments or you have a huge community that comment regularly, share a link to your blog to find out whether it’s easy for the visitor to comment on your blog.
I might also go into some detail about how you could attract more comments.
cc image credit: charlesdyer
Christopher Rice is a publisher, entrepreneur, and abstract artist in Santa Monica. He’s a founder of Wearabl, editor of CreativeBlogger, and creator of Gumball. Friend him up at Twitter | Google+ | Facebook | Pinterest |
Hey Christopher, good points brought out here.
Whats your take on third party comment plugins like Livefire or Disqus? Think they are better than the default commenting systems?
I think it depends on your needs and scale. If you’re just starting out and don’t have that many comments, you probably don’t need a third party to step in and help manage. However, sometimes their features outweigh those of the default, so it really just depends on the needs of the blog.
I’ve tried Disqus and enjoyed it, but I just use the default for the most part.
I am apart of a great commenting community called #commenthour. We do a twitter chat every Wednesday and feature 25 blogs that we all go over and comment on. It’s great for feedback like this.
I wouldn’t mind someone checking out my blog. I’m always worried people won’t find the comment form! I’m also working with a new theme and tweaking it for easier use. I think it might be a tad to complicated and I would like to know if people can navigate easily enough.
Thanks!
Hey Susan,
Looks like your comments section is easy to find — especially thanks to the hello bar. I also see you’re employing the comment luv plugin, which gives commenters even more reason to post.
Nice job!
I redesigned my blog about two weeks ago, and I spent a while tuning the comments section to look a little more attractive than your average one, with large fonts, gradients, and a huge “submit” button that just begs to be pressed. It would be awesome to have some feedback on it!
wow, looks great Feld0 — I really like the outlining color around the input boxes. Nice job on the submit button as well — that’s definitely one of the most important aspects of a comment box.
Hope all is well!