Get Your Blog Lurkers to Comment

Comments are something I enjoy having and will always want more of them, it encourages me to post more frequently and makes my blog more active. In the past I have done a lot of things to increase the number of comments I get here and I am going to share one of them now. If you are one of those bloggers who gets less comments, try this out…

Back in May 2006, I used to get lesser comments when compared to today and so I had put up a post just to encourage lurkers to comment.

Tell me a bit about yourself- who you are, where you’re from, what you do, what you like the most and what you would like to see on this site. This can encourage me to also post more frequently

This will also help you to get to know some of the other lurkers and will even give you a few hits to your site if you have one

To my surprise, the trick worked – I succeeded in getting some of the lurkers to comment!

For those of you who do not know what a lurker is, let me help by saying that a lurker is a person who reads discussions on a blog or other interactive system like chat room or forum , but rarely participates by contributing their comments.

So if you are one of those bloggers who get less comments and believe that most of your readers are lurkers, try this idea out and see if it works for you. After you put up such a post on your blog, link it here via comments so that I and other readers here can see how well it worked for you. All the best!

By the way, if you are one of those lurkers, comment now!

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Posted on December 3rd, 2006 | Category: Blogging | 12 Comments »

12 responses so far,

Utah SEO Blog

December 3, 2006 at 1:45 am

I’ve been struggling with this same type of thing for a while now. I’ve tried, mainly, to just put myself out there to comment on other people sites in a hope that they’ll return the favor (and sometimes actually asked for comments).

I will try your suggestion and see if things pick up.

Ashok

December 3, 2006 at 8:35 am

Ya, you get a good amount of comment John, Your tip is useful, I will definately try it in my blog.

patrick ghose

December 3, 2006 at 11:47 am

What about guys like me, John? I comment only when there’s something that interests me and I wish to express an opinion. But I am curious and keen about the power of the Net, the use of computers, their effectiveness as media, and their rapid developments that have both the abilities to transform and destroy. Let’s say my interests are rather more objective than subjective. I am of a generation in India which saw b/w TV for the first time when we were in our teens. Most of us tend to be computer-unfriendly, yet cannot deny the real significance of IT in our lives today.

Am I a lurker too?

But thanks for sharing!

Vibhash

December 3, 2006 at 12:24 pm

Nice tip john…but there are users who just came to your page for certain info…and genrally they don’t write comment…unfortunetly i get lots of such kind of visitors

Kyle

December 3, 2006 at 1:05 pm

Yeah it’s the same for me too, but I guess this post in general made me want to comment

Robert Irizarry

December 3, 2006 at 6:35 pm

It sounds like a solid idea. Whether or not a blog gets a lot of comments depends also on the nature of the content. I find, for example, that I get a fair number of Google hits because I’ve collected quite a bit of information related to my blog subject – guitar ergonomics. The blog is becoming something of a repository, I suppose. However, like John, I enjoy interaction. I get a sense of what readers are interested in and learn some things in the process – all of which helps to feed new ideas for the blog.

Mike Ivanov

December 3, 2006 at 8:59 pm

Hello, John.
Just wanted to say that you have a nice site, and I use your theme+style with pleasure (I guess, there was some pingback from one of my posts about it recently).
Well.. It seems that I’m one of such lurkers