5 Ways To Reward Your Commenters
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.
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Cool! I did not know you used the “DoFollow”! So here you go, this is my first comment on your blog.
Keep up the good work, I like your blog a lot. I have been reading it for almost 6 months now.
Thanks, John. I forgot to mention in the post that it’s a good idea for bloggers to publicize that they’ve disabled “nofollow”. I’ll update it now. Your first comment’s been helpful. Isn’t that great?
Eric, thanks for pointing out the “nofollow” part. I had noticed it some days back but didn’t pay any attention to it. I’d go in for the “dofollow” plugin.
Thanks for the links to the plugins. I had meant to get a dofollow plugin for comments installed over the weekend, and I’m happy to discover that there is one for trackbacks, too.