Every new blog starts out with few if any comments.
Getting regular comments on your blog is hard work. When it comes to blogging, persistence, passion and patience will keep you going until the comments start coming.
I was going to talk about tools in this post, however I’ll defer that for a follow up post. For now let’s look at some of the reasons people don’t comment - and what you can do about it.
1. They don’t know your blog exists
If no-one knows you exist, they can’t visit your blog. Your blog is one among millions of blogs. It takes time to become visible and recognized, so you need to do everything effectively promote your blog so that people know you exist. You can:
- Use Twitter and other Social Networking sites (to share when you create new posts)
- Join Communities (like My BlogLog, BlogCatalog) and take part in Blog Carnivals.
- Include your blog url in your email
- Join and genuinely contribute to forums
- Comment on other blogs
- Spread “Comment love” by commenting on other blogs as we’ve discussed
- Use plugins like “Comment Luv” to give back to commentators on your own blog
2. They read your blog using their RSS reader
Timethief touched on this point, but it’s worth repeating. Ensure you have an RSS feed on your blog as it makes it easier for people to subscribe to your blog without having to visit it. But therein lies the problem. If you offer full posts, there’s no longer any need to visit (unless your post is extremely compelling). This lowers the likelihood of comments
3. They don’t feel their comments matter to you
Tell people you’d like comments. If you get people who send you comments by email (unless it’s of a personal nature) consider saying you’d love them to comment on the blog so that everyone can benefit from their thoughts. Encourage comments by asking for opinions, feedback and their thoughts. And use open questions.
4. They feel intimidated
Some people are just wary of commenting on an open forum. Some worry their email will become spammed or shared. Re-assure them their comments are welcome and their email won’t be displayed or shared. Most blog comment boxes include text to say email won’t be displayed. You can also reassure them on your blog that their email won’t be shared with anyone else.
5. They’re busy
We’re all time challenged and as much as we’d like to it’s almost impossible to comment on all the blogs we enjoy. Composing a thoughtful comment on a blog can take time and sometimes it’s as much as people can do to take time and read the post. They may feel they want to explore your blog further and come back later. They may not comment then, but they will quite likely return.
Once you’ve built a readership you’ll find some will become regular commentators as well. Building a readership takes time, remember. So keep on blogging, and building your profile in communities you’re interested in. Focus on building traffic to your blog.
6. They planned to return and forgot
There’s not a lot you can do about this one. However you can make it easy for people to bookmark your blog by making it easy to subscribe to and bookmark your blog.
7. They want to get used to you first
Many blog readers will “blurk” (blog lurk) for quite some time before they comment. Sometimes it’s because they just want to read and don’t wish to comment. Just the other day I had the following comment on my blog…
“ I’ve been lurking for the past year and just decided to comment… by the way I love your blog, it’s been such a support to me…”
or how about this one:
“I discovered your blog about nine months ago and I’ve been happily going through your archives…”
These are not unusual. And by the time you get them you may have been getting plenty of comments. Many of my readers have “blurked” for years before they comment and some may never comment. And that’s ok. I always get a warm feeling when I see comments like this though ( Well. who doesn’t like compliments?) It’s a reminder not to focus on comments and not take a lack of comments personally.
Focus instead on creating interesting posts and content, getting found, making Google your best friend, and driving traffic to your blog.
Over to you. What’s your view on why people don’t comment? What else would you add to the list?
on 
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This is a comprehensive post that IMO covers the bases very well. I have only one point to add to it directly. I have witnessed bloggers who post comments containing obscenities and nastiness that obviously come from people who do not play well with others. If I notice that a blogger has their head in the numbers ie. is more desirous of posting lots of comments than maintaining a healthy environment for communicating in then I read but I don’t comment.
I do have a small mention I’d like to make too. It’s a second benefit that issues from reducing RSS feed displays to excerpts only. Blog scrapers are happy as clams when we provide full articles by RSS feeds or ATOM feeds for within seconds of publishing we are faced with pingback spam from splogs.
I found that when I reduced my feeds to ’summary” on one of my blogs and became selective when choosing text to be displayed in the excerpts that the pingbacks I instantly got from splog sites within moments of publishing gradually dwindled away. That freed up some time for me as I no longer needed to hunt down sploggers and send out DMCA notices to their web hosts.
Until next time, best wishes for effective and happy blogging.
timethief’s last blog post..Social media time management strategy
Hey Nicky…
Just a quickie to say thanks v much for the pointers in your post, and also to let you know that currently the link to MyBlogLog has a typo in it and so doesn’t click-thru.
Thanks Again
Dickson
This is such a useful information that I tried founding it long ago. Most of them didn’t work, but what you advised sounds quite interesting, especially I’ll work on commenting. I hope it works
Good article. I would add, reason number 8: The user has commented in the past and his/her comments have been rejected. I have a friend who has a blog, I have commented on it many times (genuinely and without offence) and he always rejected (or simply not published) my comments. He says he doesn’t accept comments that don’t support the point of his article. So I ask, “Why bother commenting?”. Moderation of comments is fine but you have to publish ALL of them not just the comments you happen to agree with. Otherwise the visitor will not bother commenting again, and you lose the visitor for the future.
@owen: I tend to agree. I think comments are very valuable even if they don’t necessarily agree with the author/s as long as they are within the commenting policy (no personal attacks, not going off-topic etc) and add something to the topic or conversation. And of course the blog owner should be clear about their comment policy. Having said that the blog owner can do whatever they like as it’s their blog…. but they will risk losing commentators.