How to Get More Comments on Your Articles.

You have likely seen a post or two with a similar title to this one. While asking your readers to comment and creating comment-worthy content are certainly important concepts to understand.

Why are comments important?

           

The benefits of user generated content are obvious to most. Not only are you generating additional unique, on-topic content for your pages, comments may even contribute to your article's freshness score. With user generated comments, you're able to get some of those alternate queries.

• Make it as easy as possible to leave a comment- Most users are wary about giving out an email address, so assure them that their data won't be used for anything other than unique identification or just let them login using Twitter of Facebook.
• Comment placement-At the very least, give users an anchor jump at the end of the article that reads "Leave a Comment" or "Join the Conversation" and bumps them down to the appropriate level.
• Social logins-once people logged in with Twitter or Facebook, it stands to reason that the chances of someone sharing your page on one of those networks increases considerably.
• Profiles, Awards, and Rankings-Anything you can do to give your loyal commenter a feeling of community and importance will encourage more comments.
• Join the conversation- Respond to comments on your articles. Took the time to write the piece, so get in there and stand by it! Keep the conversation rolling with questions of your own and address things you may have glossed over in your initial publishing.
• Email notification on reply-You can choose to alert everyone on the thread whenever anyone replies or limit it to personal replies. You could also allow users to choose for them with a simple checkbox as they reply.
• Tracking your progress-For many blogs it will be obvious when the influx of new commenter come in, but on larger sites it might be more difficult to track your progress. One simple and universal way to track your progress is to set up a Google Analytics goal associated with a new comment.