When you develop any communications strategy, it ultimately takes a lot of hard work and dedication to build an audience that cares enough to speak up. This is also true for your blog when you’re using it as a marketing or communications tool. Assuming you have developed a blogging strategy (with the end user in mind), that you fully understand your brand’s core characteristics and that you have considered the topics and areas of relevance to your consumers or customers, then a part of this strategy should be about enticing commentary to your blog.
Without comments, your blog is on a one-way street.
Remember, it’s a communication tool and hence it needs to be part of a two-way system. It will work best if it provokes interactivity. Otherwise, it’s more akin to a brochure or a book, and the power of a blog is its ability to stimulate the audience to respond and engage. It gives them a voice, and this is what drives loyalty to the brand and also provides advocacy on many occasions. So a question: is your blog struggling to get responses from readers? If so, then you may be committing one or more of the mistakes listed here:
- You are not responding to comments
- You make it too difficult to comment
- You don’t network with other bloggers
- You are not rewarding commentators
- Readers don’t comment because nobody else has
- You don’t ask for comments
- Or, sadly, your blog isn’t a reflection of relevant and interesting insights for your ideal audience
Remember to maintain your content in such a way that it will satisfy your audience.
Choose topics that are unique, trendy, topical and so on. Only these types of topics bring more blog participation. While it is usually true that controversial posts encourage large number of comments, use them sparingly. Similarly, respond to comments in such a way that the users will comment more. As you can see, there are a lot of different reasons why people might not be leaving comments on your blog. Comments play a huge role in the structure of a blog, reflect the interest of your readers and turn a blog into more of a conversation. If your blog is not a forum for discussion and comments, perhaps you need to realise that your blog isn’t working as effectively as you had hoped. The best advice is to experiment with different things, alleviate the ‘mistakes’ listed above and find out what works best for you.
