Honest Marketing Secrets

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A great blog, or web site, should stir great conversation. And really good conversation includes lots of ideas flying back and forth among participants about your subject. We want really good conversations on our blogs because if people are hashing out great ideas on our site, this will attract others who are also interested in that conversation.

So how can you encourage lots of great conversations? One way is to make it easier for people to join the conversation and another is to reward the folks who do take their precious time to hang out and “chew the fat” on your blog.

I’ve chosen just a few key plugins to help you get started. This is by no means comprehensive and if you want the BEST listing of comment related plugins I’ve ever found, (it’s overwhelming and that’s why I chose just a few here) check the end of this post . . .

Make It Easier with Good Settings

1. Get your WordPress Sorted
First, before you even worry about a plugin, make sure your WordPress settings are letting people comment without too much trouble. (I’ll mention my spam fighting methods later.)

Make sure that under Options > Discussion your settings allow commenting without moderation after the first comment by that author is moderated. Here’s how I have mine setup:

2. Make Comments Easier to Read

Nested comments can be very useful for quickly seeing who’s saying what about what. Try this plugin for threaded comments by Brian Meidell. I’m experimenting with it right now. Some people like threaded comments and some don’t. Check it out and see if it suits you.

Reward Comments with REAL Link Love

3. The Do Follow / No Follow Thingamabob

Next, if you haven’t noticed lately, there are a ton of these (or similar) icons showing up in comment sections everywhere. [I borrowed that image from randaclay.com]

In 2005 Google instituted the nofollow policy for comments and basically any link that anyone other than the author places on a site is not followed and indexed by the search engines. This means that even though you might leave your site address in your comment, if the blog, or site you’re on doesn’t reverse the nofollow policy, the major search engines will not follow your link and you will get no page-rank, or back-link credit for your post. This was done to combat spam, but it seems to have mostly combated great conversations on blogs, based on my research.

So I have decided to turn off nofollow on my blog until further notice and this means that when you comment here, you’ll get search engine credit for it. I encourage you to do the same. Obviously we don’t want to reward spammy comments and interestingly enough some of the bigger bloggers in the sphere haven’t really weighed in on this. For instance at problogger.net, all comments are still nofollow encoded (as far as I can tell. Please correct me if you note otherwise!). Check the sites you comment on and see if they use nofollow or not. I have the Search Status plugin for Firefox installed and it does this and much more for you.

Right now I’m using Dofollow by Semiologic. It’s very simple and just turns off the nofollow deal in WordPress. However, if you want to make certain only real humans who like your blog are commenting, try Lucia’s Linky Love plugin. It offers a lot of flexibility in configuring nofollow as it allows you to set the number of posts required before nofollow is removed from a commenter’s comments. This encourages only real people who are interested enough to return to your blog to comment and discourages drive-by commenters. It also has quite a few other settings and is my second choice for now because, the only caveat, it does put one more barrier between the commenter and the comment. Since this is a post about making it easier for folks to comment . . . I’ll let you know how Dofollow goes though if there’s a problem.

There are quite a few plugins out there already for disabling nofollow and Andrew Beard has already gone and done us all a huge favor by posting them here: ULTIMATE LIST OF DOFOLLOW & NOFOLLOW PLUGINS - BANISH NOFOLLOW FROM COMMENTS AND TRACKBACKS Take your pick!

UPDATE: I had some trouble with the semiologic plugin not working and I’m so swamped right now I don’t have time to troubleshoot it. So, I found this excellent alternative called DoFollow 4.0 that has some great options inlcuded by Kimmo Suominen (kiitoksia paljon!) and it worked perfectly right off the bat. Definitely check it out!

4. Commenter’s Most Recent Blog Post

Here’s a great way to help your fellow bloggers and yourself. I found out about this over at Suzanne’s blog and absolutely love this idea. Use this plugin by Andy Bailey to add a commenter’s most recent blog post title and link at the bottom of the comment. I love this idea as it really encourages even more interaction among our blogs. And it’s a great way to reward loyal commenters.

BONUS Idea # 5 (wow cool, I can turn too much typing into a bonus! see how I did that? )

5. Email Responses to Comments

Finally, place the option for commenters to tick the box if they want to be emailed about any responses to their comments. This is wonderful way to invite your readers to return to the conversation again and again. Often I can’t remember where that blog was, or which post I commented on and this is handy way to deliver that link and save time and effort for all.

I use the plugin Subscribe to Comments by Scriptygoddess and now managed by Mark Jaquith.

OK, this post is never going to end. There are more things I want to suggest and more plugins you can use to enhance your blog’s conversation power, but it will have to wait. I’ll do a whole series on conversation power, in fact. Yeah, that’s it, what a great idea! Or maybe someone else can join in. Maybe you already have! Got ideas for generating and sustaining great conversations on your blog? Share ‘em! Let’s create a great resource.

I’ll also do a complete list of my plugins soon as well and maybe that will be of interest and use to you. If you have any questions at all about this stuff, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer . ..

until next time . . .

PS - Here’s that link I promised to a vast treasure trove of comment plugin goodness over at Lorelle on Wordpress.