PeopleareParked.com

That is the question I’ve been trying to answer. What makes people comment on blogs and what can be done to encourage it?

I’ve learned some things not to do and sometimes that is the best way to learn. Perhaps by learning from my mistakes, other bloggers will benefit.

My blog is fairly new, so I’ve been trying to increase traffic to get people to read in the first place. One mistake I made was to require users to register before they could add their two cents. My main reason was not wanting to deal with all the SPAM posted automatically - wrong! This actually deters people from commenting because they have to take that extra step and give out more information than desired. Come to think of it, I like to be able to add comments to other blogs without making me jump through hoops. It just took me a bit longer to apply my own experiences to my blog.

I also turned off the option to send an email to my account every time someone comments. Found that this was not necessary, since I login to my blog everyday at least once anyhow.

Need to moderate every comment? I also found this cumbersome. The answer… add a SPAM filter like Akismet or something similar. Akismet came with my blog set up, so I just activated it and so far, so good.

If you liked what I wrote or have further suggestions, please comment!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.