When you post an article on your blog consider that the start of a conversation. As you grow your blog and gain readership, conversations will also grow. Slowly at first but it will pick up over time. The conversations on your Blog will typically happen through comments, but can also include feedback via email or another blogger posting an article with a trackback to your blog. Here are some Blogging Tips on keeping the conversations going.
Encourage – Write your articles in a way that encourages your readers to comment.
Respond – Respond to your readers comments. You don’t have to respond to every single comment but if someone is writing something that expects a response you should take the time to do so.
Join – Join in other conversations on Blogs in your niche. You can’t expect others to join your conversations if you’re not willing to do that same.
Plug-ins – There are a couple great plug-ins for WordPress to help keep the conversations going. Brian’s Threaded Comments which allows commenting to comments, and Subscribe to comments which allows a commenter the ability to subscribe to new comments via email.
Forums – If your blog is one that would benefit from forums then it may be something to consider. This will expand your blogs conversations. Blogging Tips uses Forums and it is a great place to ask questions, get advice and join in the conversation here on BloggingTips.com. (Shameless Plug)
So what do you think? Do you have ideas and suggestions on keeping the conversation going between your blog and your readers? Let us hear them by leaving a comment.
I think Problogger style is good. In the end of every post, ask readers a question which they can debate.
I see you've done that.
I think taking part in fellow bloggers discussions is important. People appreciate those who take the time to comment and take part in discussions in their blogs. Not only that, being active on related blogs to yours will give you plenty of ideas for posts.
@ Marco – I like the ending in a question method.
Makes people feel like they are being asked a question at the end that they should answer.
@ Kevin – Yea, you can never have too many things to write about. If you only post once a day your looking at close to 400 articles a year. Now do that 3 or 4 times a day and your well over 1000 articles.
One thing that gets talked about a lot, but still isn't used by everyone, is the subscribe to comments plugin. If there's not an option to subscribe, I'll probably forget where all I've left comments, and not know if the author replied or not. On the other hand, at blogs like problogger that get tons of comments, it can become annoying to get emails all the time with new comments that aren't great discussion material.
The challenge, then, is to encourage great discussion, not just comments. That way the readers who subscribed will keep coming back to participate, rather than just being overwhelmed with noise from other readers.
What do you think?
Right you are Travis. I have tried asking people questions in a conversation on John Chow, Problogger and others only to be bombarded with emails from worthless comments.
This is a problem I'm not sure I would know how to combat. Then again I don't get nearly the comments they do.