I have spoken quite a lot recently, on this blog and on message boards, about how important commenting on other blogs can be in order to drive traffic to your own blog. For this post I wanted to tip it around 90 degrees and talk about attracting comments to your own blog.
When you first created your blog, and started writing content, did you do what I used to do and keep checking your admin panel to see if anyone had left you a comment on one of your posts? How often did you use to check? I would check probably about once an hour.
I don’t know about you but it used to drive me absolutely crazy.
It took me a good couple of months to go from watching my posts go without comments to thinking of ways to entice comments. I have listed five of those ways below.
1. Make Your Blog Do-Follow
This is something that I now do from day one with all my blogs. If you make your blog do-follow then it means when someone comments and they leave their web site URL then it will help them with their PR.
This encourages people to make comments better than anything else I have used.
2. Turn Off Your Spam Filter
If receiving tons of spam comments is not something you are concerned with then you could turn off any spam filter plugin you have running. I would not recommend this but then again I do receive thousands of spam comment posts a day.
3. Install Top Commentator Or CommentLuv Plugin
If setting your blog to do-follow is something that does not appeal to you then why not install a couple of plugins like top commentator and CommentLuv? What these two plugins do is reward commentators for commenting by publishing a do-follow link to their web site.
4. Run A Competition
This is something that I have tried and found partial success with. You run a contest and people enter by leaving a comment. It is as simple as that. You’ll be surprised how many people will comment when prizes are on the line.
The only drawback to this is that you will find lots of comments like “put my name down”, “I’m in” and “good luck everyone”.
5. Write A Very Controversial Post
This is something that not a lot of people will be able to pull off without coming across as an idiot. If you write a controversial post then you will make it almost impossible for the reader to leave without leaving his thoughts.
Be prepared to get some heated replies though and it isn’t something I’d recommend if you want to bond with your readers.
Have you found a way to attract comments that I have not listed? Why not leave a comment and let us know what they are?



I am a 33 year old full-time freelancer & blogger from East London, United Kingdom, who has been working online since early 2001.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
all excellent points with exception of maybe turning off you spam filter ^_^
Yeah I admit I slipped that one in as a bit of a joke. The worrying thing is that there are some that do that (I have a friend who does it) just to get comments.
I’m still nofollow
Visit me, how about link exchange with me?
Dofollow is possibly the best thing I ever did to entice comments on this blog.
Turn Off Your Spam Filter
i will never do that because Turn Off Spam Filter it mean support for spammer spam your blog. it’s not good
Once again this is something that no sensible person would do but there are a lot who will do this.
Thanks for dropping by.
This post helped me a lot. Great blog by the way and looking forward to read your next article
ps; writimg a controversial post will make it almost impossible for the reader to leave without leaving his thoughts – i sill try to do so
Glad it offered you some ideas.
Turning off Spam filter is not ideal since it will harm your site and ruin your reputation online. It would be best to keep them on and then just moderate the comments that are coming into your site.
I would not suggest doing this either but a few people do recommend doing it, maybe they enjoy the mass spam.