The best blogs are the ones where the reader interacts with the blogger. This is done directly via comments left on the blog itself and indirectly via trackbacks from other blogs. While the SEO guy inside of me thinks that getting lots of trackbacks (links! more links! more!) is the ideal situation, the blogger beside him thinks that the comments are much more important.

So how do you encourage readers to leave comments on your blog? One way is to write about controversial topics, things that inflame or excite people. Another is to build up such a large subscriber base that the sheer number of readers you have ensures that you get lots of comments. These and other strategies are all well-documented elsewhere. (As a side note, you should do whatever it takes to make commenting easy, but that’s a separate topic that I’ll discuss later.)

But there’s one strategy to encourage comments that is underused: rewarding your commenters for commenting. Without further ado, then, here are five ways to reward your commenters for making your blog better.

1. Praise and Public Recognition

The best way to let commenters know you appreciate them is to tell them! This can be done in various ways:

• Sending them an email.
• Leaving comments in reply to their comments.
• Writing a post about your top commenter(s).
• Using plugins like Top Commenters or Show Top Commentators.

I definitely do the first and second alternatives, but I don’t do enough of the others. To that end, let me mention that Chuck Brown (whose site, unfortunately, is down at the moment!) is definitely the most insightful commenter on this blog of mine and brings real value to all of our discussions.

2. Adding Commenters To Your Blogroll

In some ways this is just an extension of the first way to reward commenters, and is extremely simple to do, but I’ve separated it out because I think that putting someone in your blogroll is a big step that shouldn’t be taken lightly. After all, the links on your blogroll end up on most of your pages. It’s kind of like moving from casual dating to “going steady”.

3. Disabling “nofollow”

A while back, WordPress switched to marking links in comments and trackbacks using the “nofollow” attribute. This was done in an attempt to reduce comment spam by deflating the value of the links left by bogus commenters. Unfortunately, it also means that legitimate commenters get penalized, since a “nofollow” link is implicitly treated by the search engines as a vote against the page being linked to.

If you like your commenters and want to help them out, why not disable the default “nofollow” behavior? You can do this quite simply using the DoFollow plugin.
(Note that for trackbacks there’s a similar plugin called DoFollow Trackbacks that does the same thing for trackbacks — one way to encourage more links back to your pages.)

Do not do this, however, unless and until you have a good comment spam solution installed on your blog! I recommend Akismet, even if you have to use the pro version — it’s well worth it!

Be sure to publicize your “nofollow” disabling so that readers know it’s worth the effort to make a comment or two. For the record, I use the DoFollow plugin and have removed “nofollow” from the comments and trackbacks on this blog.

4. Revenue Sharing

Now this is perhaps a bit too radical for some people, but it could certainly encourage more comments. If you’ve monetized your blog, why not let your most valuable/insightful commenters share in that revenue stream? Technically, this is not hard to do. You just need a list of the commenters and their various affiliate IDs and AdSense publisher IDs, which you would insert at appropriate times into your ad code. For example, you could devote 10% of your revenues to your top commenters and split that 10% between them by their frequency of commenting. The hard part is maintaining the list of top commenters: while you could do it automatically based on comment frequency, it’s probably best to manually create the list of commenters based on what they actually contribute to the discussions. As anyone who’s been in a classroom situation knows, those who open their mouths the most often don’t have anything substantial to say.

5. Promoting Commenters to Contributors

The final way to reward a commenter is to “promote” them to a contributor/editor status. You can do this informally by asking them to write some guest posts, or you can do it formally by actually changing their user level within the blogging system. (This is very easy to do with WordPress.) The latter shows great trust, of course, and isn’t something you should do lightly.

What Do You Want To See?

Those are my top 5 ways to reward commenters. So here’s a chance for you to expand on my list. What have I missed and what’s your preferred way to be rewarded? Don’t be shy!

Rewards can also go the other way: be sure to read my previous post How To Support Your Favorite Bloggers for ideas on how you can reward your favorite bloggers for all their hard work.

Sponsored Link: Have a dog that’s running loose? Read my Invisible Fence story for some advice.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

A few days ago I reposted my essay on why marketers sell resale rights. It was good timing, because shortly after the SendUsTo.US “firesale” started, which lets you buy 100 resale rights products (some have basic resale rights, some have master resale rights) for only $47 until July 31. (And if you buy, you’re also offered the chance to buy over 100 private label rights products for an additional fee.) Again, this just shows how much money there is to be made just selling things to other Internet marketers — it’s the whole if-there’s-a-gold-rush-then-sell-them-shovels mentality.

Still, these kinds of sales are an easy way to pick up products that interest you, whether or not you plan to resell them. Even if you’re only interested in 10% of them, that means you get them for less than $5 each.

What I like about this promotion besides the clever domain name (send us to “dot” US) is the whole “immigration” angle of sending three Malaysian Internet marketers to the United States… although it’s not really an immigration thing, they’re just going to attend a conference! The premise is somewhat novel, at least.

If resale rights products interest you, then you should study this promotion as well, as it shows one way to make money with resale rights — by packaging the products together into a bundle and selling the bundle cheaply.

Anyhow, I’ll be back shortly with the next part in the mobile-ready series.

Sponsored Link: Have a dog that’s running loose? Read my Invisible Fence story for some advice.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

As you’ve probably heard by now, Google is testing a version of AdSense for mobile users. Up until now, AdSense publishers haven’t really had to worry about mobile users. But with all the recent fuss about the Apple iPhone, more people are realizing that they can (slowly, at least for now) browse the Web from their mobile phone. When Google releases its mobile AdSense solution, will you be ready to take advantage of the growing segment of mobile Internet users? Probably not! That’s why I’m writing this series of articles. Today we start by looking at the reality of mobile browsing and why you’re going to have to change your site if you want to make things easier for your mobile users.

The Evolution of the Mobile Web

As a longtime employee of the leading vendor of mobile middleware and the author of numerous books and articles about mobile application development, I’ve had a front-row seat from which to view the evolution of the mobile Web. And, let me tell you, it’s taken a long time to get to where we are today.

It’s important to distinguish between mobility and the mobile Web. Mobility refers to the running of applications on devices that are inherently mobile. Such devices tend to be small (typically using a handheld form factor) and very constrained with respect to processing and data storage capabilities when compared to a typical desktop computer.

Many people consider “mobility” and “wireless” to be synonymous, but mobility actually goes beyond wireless communication. The original Palm devices, for example, had no wireless capabilities and yet could still exchange data with external applications by connecting them (typically through a “cradle” or a USB connection) to a computer or a network. Writing applications that work in the disconnected environment of devices like these can be particularly challenging, especially when the applications need to interface with corporate databases — this is where serious development tools (think mobile database and data synchronization) become essential.

The mobile Web refers to the subset of the World Wide Web that can be used from mobile devices. Like the normal Web, it’s accessed through an on-device web browser. Early versions of the mobile Web focused on non-HTML technologies like WAP for interacting with the user, but these have fallen out of favor as network speeds and device capabilities have improved. Today, in theory, any site on the Web can be accessed through a mobile device. The reality is far different, however, because few of those sites are actually mobile-ready. In fact, the trend to use network- and CPU-intensive technologies like AJAX (where the web browser is continuously talking to a web server in the background in order to update onscreen data) is shrinking the effective size of the mobile Web.

How Sites Fail The Mobility Test

Let’s look at what makes the mobile Web different. There are three primary problems to overcome.

Problem #1: Small Screen Size

If you’ve ever tried to browse the Web on a handheld mobile device, your first thought was probably that the screen was incredibly small compared to your desktop or laptop. Desktop monitors have been getting wider and wider in recent years, but handheld devices can only go so wide before they stop qualifying as “handheld”.

The horizontal bias of the tethered Web leads to sites that render poorly on small screens. Consider the CNN site. Here’s what it looks like in Firefox on my desktop (I’ve shrunk the image to 400 pixels):

Here’s the same page on my BlackBerry:

As you can see, site navigation dominates the latter: I have to scroll down quite a bit to see any stories. To keep content “above the fold” on a mobile device you have to move the content to the top left of the page and put all the navigational and ancillary stuff (like the ads!) elsewhere. Here, for example, is a properly-formatted CNN home page shown on a different mobile device:

This CNN home page has been specially designed for use with the free AvantGo mobile web browser, so content is the priority. For most devices this is the kind of reworking you need to do to your pages in order for them to be mobile-ready. The only exception are devices like the Apple iPhone that use a “pan and scan” browser that displays the web page as if it were being shown on a larger screen and lets you move around and zoom in and out of the parts that interest you. For most devices, though, pushing content to the top left is a necessity.

And don’t even get me started about data input problems…

Problem #2: Unsupported Technologies

Although there are still some die-hards out there that turn off the JavaScript support in their browsers, much of the Web becomes unusable — or at least harder to use — if there’s no JavaScript. And I’m not just saying this because I’m an AdSense publisher and AdSense ads only show if JavaScript is enabled. Many sites don’t function well without JavaScript. Even logging in to certain sites requires JavaScript support these days.

And then there are all the sites built on AJAX technologies. AJAX in this case refers to “asynchronous JavaScript and XML”, which is a fancy way to say “run some JavaScript whenever the user does something on the page and update the page with data from the web server based on what the user did”. If your mobile browser doesn’t support JavaScript, or doesn’t support it fully, none of that fancy AJAX functionality is going to work, is it?

But it’s not just JavaScript. Flash is a problem, too. Consumer-oriented sites use a lot of Flash-based interaction. That stuff just won’t work on most mobile browsers today. Audios and videos may not play, either. In some ways, the mobile Web is where the tethered Web was 7 or 8 years ago, and that really affects how sites built to today’s standards work (or don’t) on mobile web browsers.

Problem #3: Slow and Unreliable Networks

What’s been one of the common complaints about the iPhone? That the web browsing is too slow. If you’ve ever tried to browse the Web on your own mobile device, you’ll know that blazingly fast download speeds isn’t something you can expect.

Wireless network speeds are all over the map, but they’re all slower than what you expect on a tethered device. The iPhone suffers because it’s on an EDGE network, which isn’t particularly fast (although it’s better than the GPRS we were stuck with a few years back). There are faster solutions out there, it all depends what carrier you’re on and what model of device you have. And how many other people in your area are also browsing the Web from their own devices — remember that you’re sharing wireless bandwidth with everyone else in the same cell area.

Another problem with mobile devices is that they can wander in and out of network coverage. There’s nothing more frustrating that trying to download a page and losing it halfway through the download because of some kind of network problem. These issues don’t crop up nearly as much as they used to, but it’ll still happen from time to time and it’s another reason to keep the pages on your site as small and content-rich as possible.

What’s Next

That’s the end of this first part. In the second part we’ll start looking at the things you can do to your site or blog to make it mobile-ready. A few simple things can make a big difference in your site’s usability.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.