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In today’s Q&A, we are talking about how to get more comments on your blog.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Our question today comes from Bob of Cubicle Bliss
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Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to today’s Q&A mini podcast and we are going to answer today a question from Bob Bassett. I hope I said that right, Bob, of CubicleBliss.com. Bob writes:
“I have a site that deals with the office environment and products that help improve the work place. I average over 10,000 page views per month, but I hardly get any comments. How do I generate more comments?
I thought about adding a forum or creating a Facebook group, but I’m not sure if that’s the best route. I love what you guys do. I have a long commute so your podcast and Q&As really motivate me on my work commute so some day I will never have to make that commute again.”
SHANE: All right, Bob, we’ve got a couple of suggestions for you on how to get more comments on your blog. We get a lot of comments on Flipped Lifestyle, probably more than most. For some reason, our people are really engaged on there and we do get a lot of comments on our different blog posts and podcasts, and things like that.
There are a couple of things that you can do to kind of spur that conversation on. The first thing is we always say this is not field of dreams with Kevin Costner. Nothing online works if you build it, they will come and people will just magically engage with you. A lot of people sell that, but that is totally false hopes.
If you want people to do something online, you have to either ask them to do something, tell them to do something, or show them exactly how you want them to do something. If you want more comments on your blog, you’re going to have to have specific call to action on your blog post that say, “How would you handle this situation? Leave a message in the comments” or “What do you think about this topic? Leave a message in the comments.”
Don’t be afraid to ever ask for anything on the internet especially when you’re giving so much value on your blog and you’re helping people do better in their workplace environment. You’re giving so much value. Don’t be afraid to ask them to engage with you in your comment section.
You can do a Facebook group and things like that, but the question we always ask ourselves is, “Do we want all that content that’s generated by the comments to live on Facebook or do we want it to live on our blog?” That’s why we keep a comment section.
A lot of people get rid of their comments and try to engage only on social media. We think that there’s a lot of value in that conversation being included with our blog post so we leave our comments open and we try to drive traffic to that post so that we can get all that engagement. The first tip is, tell your people what you want them to do. Ask them a question, engage with them. Let them know, “Hey, I want to hear from you. Sound off in the comments.”
JOCELYN: Yeah, a lot of people think this is kind of obvious. I have a comment section so people know to leave comments there. Well, that’s not necessarily true. People may not even notice that you have a comments section so if you’re writing a blog post, just stick down there at the bottom, ask them a question and say, “Respond in the comment section.”
SHANE: A big mistake that a lot of people make too, if you go to Flipped Lifestyle and you scroll down, there is almost no separation between our comment section and the actual blog post or the podcast show notes. A lot of people will put like 10 related posts and all these share buttons and there’s all these junk in between their comment section.
I have not looked at your site, Bob, so I’m not sure exactly how yours work. If you want people to flow into your comments, as soon as you end your blog post, the very next thing needs to be your comment section and then you can put like your share buttons below it or right in between, but you don’t want like 10 things in between your comment section.
You’ve got to make it easy for people to find your comments, to get to your comments, and to leave you comments if you want them to.
JOCELYN: You can even run incentives to get people to do this. I do this a lot. If there is something that I really want people to do on my site, off my site, or whatever, I try to run some type of contest to get them to do what it is that I want them to do.
You could say in a blog post or maybe on social media, “Hey, I’m doing a comment contest. Leave a comment on my blog and you’ll be entered to win XYZ.” That’s just another way that you could possibly get people to start leaving more comments and once they get used to doing that, they may come back and leave other comments later.
SHANE: So to close this question up Bob, the biggest thing is tell people what you want them to do, ask them to do it, show them how to do it, and give them a reason to do it. They are just not going to leave a comment because you wrote a blog post. You’ve got to give them some reason. Is that a price, is that a contest, or is that just a question. “Hey, come leave a comment on my blog” and you should see your engagement pick up, especially with that much traffic.
If you’re getting that much traffic, then you could probably just tweak a couple of things and you should be able to pull a few of those people in.
Always remember too, a very low percentage of people comment on blogs. We have hundreds of thousands of people going through all of our websites and we do get good comments but we don’t get millions of comments. Even people like Pat Flynn. Pat Flynn probably has hundreds of thousands of people come to his website a day. He is still only getting a couple of hundred comments.
If you can get four, five, six comments to kind of build some engagement down there starting out, that’s a great number to kind of shoot for.
All right guys. That was a great question. If anybody else has a question, make sure you send it in over at FlippedLifestyle.com/QASJ and we would love to answer it on air. Thanks for listening.
JOCELYN: See yah.
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