Firstly to my readers who celebrate Christmas, have yourselves a very Merry Christmas, make it fun and safe. And I have a gift for you, especially if you are struggling to find traffic on your blog. I want to take this opportunity to give some effective tips to help you get not just a huge amount of traffic but comments on your blog.
1. Be Sure to Write Good Content– This is an issue that so many bloggers have difficulty with. I even struggle with this myself and it is very easy to get stumped due to having a bad case of writer’s block. However, if you want traffic, interest and intelligent comments on your blog from your readers, you must have good content on there. Where can you find ideas to get good content? Well that is easy. Find blogs that are related to your niche. Do so by Googling your niche as well as “blogs”. For instance, you are a dog trainer and want to write up a good blog on dog training, Google “dog training blogs” and the ones that are ranking high on search engines are the ones that are receiving a lot of traffic and comments on theirs. That is what is effective in SEO these days so use those blogs as examples, and just get ideas from them. You can find ideas easily from what the blogger is writing about and create posts based on those. That will not be hard to do and common sense should tell you to never copy someone else’s work and pass it off as yours. You may need help with ideas for topics but you are capable of writing your own take on an idea that someone else has written about. If I am not clear on that I will give you an example. You find a highly successful blog in the dog training niche. Topics such as “general puppy training” or “tips on stopping your dog from begging” appealed to you. It is fine to use those topics for your blogs but do your own research or if you are an expert on those topics, then let it spill out of you. It cannot get more unique than that and readers like anything that is unique, and so do search engines.
2. Update Your Blog Often – If you end up with interested readers, they will subscribe to your RSS feeds and will expect new content from you on a regular basis. If you do not write new posts very often, your subscribers will lose interest and opt out. It is recommended to write a post at least once a week. Not to mention, your blog will rank high on search engines quite fast if you update on a regular basis.
3. Give Your Readers Incentives to Comment on your Blog – Do you have an ebook that would normally cost money? Do you have a webinar, a free video, or an audio? Place it on your post or place the download link to the ebook there. People will either watch the video, and comment on your post. If you chose to have your readers download an ebook from your posts, be sure to add in the ebook itself for your readers to leave feedback with the URL of the blog post and they will gladly do it.
An another note, if you want something of yours retweeted, you can go to Pay With a Tweet and create an account. You upload your ebook, and then you are given a code of the button that your readers on your blog will need to hit to tweet in order to get the free upload. At the same token, your ebook that you would use for this purpose could have your URL of your blog post in it so people who have downloaded it could easily come back to it and leave their thoughts.
4. Contests Are Highly Effective – Anyone would love to get a free $50 or you could even make it higher if you feel you want to give that away. You can create a post where people would have an incentive to comment on it if they had a chance to win money from you. For instance, you decide to hold a content for the first 50 people who comment on your latest blog post. The contest would be “You Have a Chance to Win $75 for the Best Embarrassing Story from your Childhood- to the First 50 Commenters” or whatever you feel would pique someone’s interest. So when the 50 are up, you choose one random comment, email the commenter to tell him or her the good news of winning, and to ask for the PayPal address so you can place the money in the account. Let your readers know that you will hold a content like this again in the future and that will keep them interested! Of course you need to take your budget into consideration. You can also give them free access to a course you are selling instead.
5. Product Launches – This is a highly effective way to get easy comments. You have a product you are ready to launch, and you write a blog about it and you will want feedback on it. Give the product away for free to the first 15 or 20 commenters of your blog post so they can leave feedback. It is up to you how many review copies you will want to give away before officially launching. But the purpose is to get feedback and as a bonus affiliates! Then you will have readers who will be constantly checking your blog for updates.
6. Build a List – There are plenty of courses and information on list building out there so I suggest you take a look at those as I am not going to get into that here. But once you do and have a list of subscribers, be sure to send regular updates to them from your autoresponder telling them about a new blog post you had written and why it would interest them, and that you would appreciate feedback from them. Give them something small for free if they comment.
It is not difficult to get blog comments if you use these techniques and I will be doing this a lot more myself for the next year (one of those silly resolutions I guess). But how do I know this works? Because I have seen successful marketers use this technique and I have used some of it myself- and it works. One day soon I may hold a bit of a contest 🙂 Be sure to check back often so you don’t miss your chance!
Just so you know I had written an ebook called Nineteen Powerful Tips to Increase Your Chances of Being Retweeted to help you understand what kind of tweets to create if you want others to retweet them! You need to retweet this in order to get the ebook! Best to you and have a safe Holiday!
Great tips. I need to update my blogging next year so I’ll keep this handy!
Thank for the tips Miriam
Mi piace. Tanti Auguri Miriam.
Great tips.
So True Miriam. The key is to understand that google has the goal of being the most relevant site in the world. writing and attracting your audience through real relevant value is Candy for an google algorithm.
True Bryan. Long gone are the days where you can slap a bunch of links to your website and to expect it to be on top of Google. UNIQUE content is King and that will ALWAYS be the case.
Sound advice from one who has the experience to know.
Awesome tips Miriam. I am going to create a blog soon and will bookmark your post when I am done with it.
Great tips Miriam – also I’ve added a Facebook post feature and have seen comments on the rise! In other words, make it easy for people to comment!
Looking forward to reading all 19 tips – thanks for putting that together!
Wow these are great. Thanks.
Great tips and thanks for sharing. I post to my blog 5 to 6 times each week. There is always something to write about.
Leanne Hoagland-Smith
Very useful tips! Following them all should bring more comments indeed!
Great Fun Tips Miriam… Thanks for sharing… Blog Comments are very important and it is a way for us to learn from each other as well…