OK, you’ve tried the Top Commentator plugin and you turned off nofollow all in the hope of getting more people commenting on your blog and they’re still not commenting. It’s time to get evil! Comments on a blog are a better sign of activity than how often a blog is updated. A blog can do multiple posts per day but if there are no comments in any of them, a reader will question if anyone reads it (unless comments has been turned off). Here are some evil ways to increase blog comments.
Start a Commenting Group
We all know about Digg groups that get together to digg their stories to the front page. You can get together with a few other bloggers and start a commenting group or just join an existing one. You all agree to comment on each others’ blogs and this helps to maintain a level of minimum comment activity on your blog.
Setting up a comment group is kinda like taking link exchanges to the next level. Link exchanges help readers and search engines discover other blogs but they don’t create a sense of activity and a non-active blog is a dead blog. This is not to say you should comment on blogs that only comment on your blog. Commenting on other people’s blog (especially the big ones) is a very good way to bring targeted traffic to your blog.
Buy The Comments
If you can’t find a comment group to join then you can try to buy the comments. While you can pay people to comment on your blog, a better way would be to dangle a carrot in front of them with a reply to contest. Whenever I post about a contest that requires a simple reply to enter, I easily get up to 300 comments in the post.
This blog already gets enough enough comments as it is so why do I need to do a reply contest? It’s all part of the overall marketing plan. A large percentage of readers are new. When they see a post with 300 comments, it tells them that this is a happening blog.
The main problem with a reply to contest is it only generates comments to one post. It looks very strange to see one post with a bunch of comments and the rest with none. The solution would be to give commentators additional entries if they leave a comment in another post.
Be Your Own Top Commentator
If all else fail then it’s time for you to be the top commentator. Make up an alias and reply to your own post. Now you may think this is dishonest but in marketing, perception is everything and the perception is a blog without any comments is not a happening blog.
I’ve seen blog posts where the blogger asked a question from his readers. A couple of days later I got back and there’s zero comments to the question. That does not look good. If you are going to ask a question from your readership and there’s no reply, then answer it yourself with an alias. Having one comment on there is better than having none. That one comment may be all that’s needed to get the comment ball rolling. If you’re really evil, you’ll set up a bunch of aliases and really make the blog come to life. Remember, perception is everything.
Comment As a Big Name Blogger
This one is really pushing it but I’ve seen it done a few times. You leave a comment on your blog using a well known blogger. The ideal being to show, “Look! John Chow commented on my blog and you should too!” I really don’t recommend doing this because if the big name finds out, he may out you and that’ll kill your reputation.