If you own a blog and you have ever received a comment, then you and I both know, it’s not a common thing that you see the same commentator come back again. It’s always a new person.
In most cases, people comment and leave and barely ever come back, only a whopping twenty percent of the people will turn loyal and revisit your site.
Obviously, the more comments our blogs get, the better, it means the blog is alive, it equals social proof, and it makes a blog a blog.
Before we deal with how to interact with comments, first you need to “get” those people to touch their keyboards and start expressing their thoughts.
The two types
There are two types of people that you need to know about, ones that are novice internet users and ones that are people who know about commenting.
You can skip the ones who know about blogs and comments, but you need to pay attention to the internet users who don’t or have little knowledge of all this.
Now, imagine yourself as one of those:
You read information from a blog and then leave and wait for new stuff to come by some other day. You never contribute (as in commenting).
The only thing they do is read.
And that is their weakness.
Step one: Hook their first comments
If they are solely readers, it’s a fact that they will see every single thing you write, so why not directly get them to comment? Be challenging and ask them something worthwhile to answer, don’t just drop in a random question.
When people comment the first time, there will be a second time.
But to make the first time happen, it’s up to you. Make them do it, think of the scenario as yourself as, and brainstorm what it takes for them to leave their thoughts.
Now, pretend you see a comment pop up in your dashboard, you’re all excited.
However, there’s a catch, there’s a trick you need to perform to get them to come back again.
Let’s be honest, do you respond to every single comment you get? Well, I do, even to useless words like “nice post I like it very much”, if it gets past Akismet and I approve it, it’s a law that I would respond to it, or else there would have been no point in approving the comment in the first place.
Plus, it’s rude if someone talks to you and you ignore them, how do you expect the commentators to comment again? You’ve just ruined your first impression.
Step two: Respond
That makes sense, why would anyone want to leave a comment knowing that they won’t get a reply? Man, I see this mistake a lot from other bloggers.
No, the excuse isn’t because you were busy or you didn’t have anything worthwhile to say.
If someone said something, there must be something you can talk back about, as blog owners, that’s our job.
Provided that you do respond to comments,
How do you talk back? In a casual manner? In a rude manner? In a positive manner?
Yeah, I had it. In a casual manner. Was that your answer? Unfortunately, that’s not what you should be doing.
You need not only to be casual.
Replying to your comment back in a casual manner surely is how things work, but here’s the strategy:
Be remarkable.
What on Earth does that mean?
It means that you have to create a remarkable image in your commentators’ minds. You’ve got to say something that makes him/her want to reply to your response.
Even if he doesn’t, don’t worry, you have already sent a natural hidden message in his mind, a message that tells him he needs to come back for updates on your blog.
And that is:
The catch: Respond remarkably
Don’t freak out if he doesn’t respond to your remarkable response, he will come back, he might contribute to your blog in another way for example purchasing your e-books, tweeting your posts, or telling his/her friends about you.
So this is how you should respond remarkably, you need to carefully craft this stuff yourself, it’s industry-specific. This is similar to the idea of using attractive headlines, but instead, you write attractive comments. (attractive to that particular commentator, not all commentators)
You could be speaking in a half-weird manner, you could answer a comment in question form, esempio:
Not attractive: thanks for your comment I think this point is great too.
Discussion generator: would you ever use this X method? like seriously.
The ideas are countless.
Make it look like you’re teasing him but positively, when the commentator sees such a not-so-usual reply, it must be hard not to talk back.
That’s it.
When he talks back, which most of the time he will, and if he doesn’t, he will do it on other posts (you’ll have to lower your remarkable response’s intensity because some people can’t take it).
You be casual.
This is the right moment to build relationships (in the friend’s way), don’t be afraid to start threaded conversations.
As time gradually ticks away, loyalty strengthens. [Of course, you have to keep on writing content]
You’d be king, he’d be a slave. (lame joke)
Now, the real problem kicks in, we live in a world where nothing is perfect.
What if the commentator doesn’t come back to read your response?
You send them an email with the conversation in it.
Solution: Use a Comment Reply plugin, craft a unique layout for the email in the settings, don’t use the plain default version, be remarkable and drive good first-time impressions.
Well, that won’t make things perfect but it will certainly get you the most amount of loyal commentators, see for yourself.
No comment because this is too nitty-gritty? I expected. (but you can still talk).