Commenting Tips to Make Your Comments Stick

Regular contributor, Alyssa, gives us some powerful commenting advice.

If you are making comments on a high trafficked website with lots of posts, making your comments stick is very difficult. When you are making a comment on a post, remember that commenting is not just for one way link building, but also intended to connect, build more traffic to your site, and network. If your comments can stand our from the crowd and attract the attention of other readers, then they can bring you immense benefits. Wary of spammers and website scrapers some websites are using strict filtering policies which can take suspicious and irrelavent comments straight into the spam box. Below are some of the best tips to make your comments stick and stand out from the crowd:

Read the Post Carefully

As the saying goes you should first be a good reader in order to be good writer. Many people don’t read the post carefully before making a comment. They are too eager to leave the comment first and fail to understand the meaning the post. But you should always remember that it is absolutely necessary to read the comment and understand its meaning completely to leave a quality comment. A well targeted quality comment can help you in standing out from the crowd.

Format your Comments

Just like you format the content in your blog, you can also format your comments. Formatting your comments includes things like making some sentence bold or italic, using quotes, making lists, etc. Formatting your comments will make your comments look attractive to the eyes of the reader. Making the comments look attractive will ensure that people will at least skim them even if they don’t read them completely. But, it is advisable not to use HTML comments in your comments as some blog filters can send your comments straight to the spam folder.

Make Long Comments

Making long comments will be helpful in catching the attention of both the readers and bloggers alike. Long comments will helpful in expressing your views and ideas more clearly. But, always keep in mind that you should actually know what you are talking about. Long comments should add good insight, give another solution to the problem stated in the question, start a debate, give an alternative point of view, add some more points to the post list, etc. Pointless long comments will be annoying and may bore the readers.

Reply to the First Commenter

This strategy will work absolutely well where there are too many comments to count. Most of the readers will surely read the first comment to any post. Replying to the first commenter (or the second commentor if the first one looks irrelevant) will make sure that others will also read your comment. Make sure to make a good point though! Replying to the first comment can also start a thread of comments. Other interested readers will stop and read the thread and can even jump in to share their opinion. If you remain in control of the thread, the payoffs can be great.

Prefer to be Notified of the Replies

This tactic is mostly similar to the previous one. Most of the comment systems in blogs will have a check mark so that you can request to be notified regarding the follow-up comments. Checking this mark will keep you update with all the follow-up comments on a particular post. This will keep you engaged with the host blogger as well as get in touch with some other readers of the blog.

Ping your Comments

Pinging is a mechanism to notify your server that the content in your blog has been updated. The servers will then notify other pinging services regarding the update which will in turn make search engine bots to check and consider the new content in your blog. If the search engine bots can check the new content on your blog, they can then discover your link quickly and attribute it to your site. You can ping your blog posts through online services like Pingler.net, Pingoat.net, Pingomatic.com, etc.

Use Blogger’s Name

Always remember to use the bloggers name while commenting. This practice will first show respect to the blogger and attention to detail on your part. Secondly this will also help in retrieving your comment from the spam folder if it ends up there. Using the blogger’s name will make other people to give more importance to your comment.

The above tips will help you only if you can add any value with your comment. Otherwise, your comments will just get diluted among the crowd.

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Alyssa is a writer/blogger. She loves writing travelling and reading books. She contributes in bornrich.