WordPress Plugins that Promote Comment Participation

It is very important to learn about what WordPress plugins are useful to help promote comment participation on your blog. There is an interesting article on problogger.com by Jakob Nielsen, that was based on a study about blog commentators.

Case study statistics:
* 90.0% of people online do not comment. They only read and/or make observations.
*  0.9% comment and contribute very little.
*  0.1% of the people that are online, are active and participate regularly.

The 1% margin, is commonly referred to as the 1% rule. However, you'll have to do some homework, to figure out how you can do to break that rule. Therefore, with the help of some WordPress plugins, you'll lighten your homework load.

I spent some time looking at comment plugins over at WordPress. It was a bit overwhelming to find the best ones that get the job done. However, I did manage to find the best ones that I felt were suited for the job. The five WordPress plugins that I recommend to use to encourage your readers to comment on your blog are the following.

1. CommentLuv
Basically, CommentLuv gives your readers an extra incentive to comment. When one of your readers fill out the comment form, the plugin will extract the visitors latest blog post tile and URL from your RSS feed. The intentions of the plugin are to give your readers a bit more information about the commentator and their blog and niche.

2. Top Commentators
The top commentator's plugin will list the top commentators in a widget. The plugin offers the top commentators on your blog a backlink which you can either set to do-follow or no-follow. The do-follow tag will pass Google's juice and deliver you some extra traffic to your site. The no-follow is good for picking up some extra traffic to your site and won't pass any Google juice to your commentators. It is entirely up to you how you want to reward your top commentators.

3. Dofollow Plugin
The dofollow plugin, simply allows you to pass some Google juice to the commentator's site. This will in return help to increase their PageRank. Therefore, it motivates people to comment on your blog. However, it also increases the amount of spam comments you get as well. What you should be looking for in comments are ones that add content to your discussion. On my blog, you have to convince me that you have read the blog post, and you have to have something to say that pertains to the topic. If you leave comments such as, "Nice Blog, I'm bookmarking your site and coming back very soon" or "I sort of came across your blog by accident looking for something else. I was glad I did though it is great. I just wanted to let you know I stopped by your page!" These types of comments are nothing more than spam to me, and I delete them.

4. Subscribe to Comments
This plugin will help to keep your readers up-to-date with discussions taking place on your blog. They will receive an e-mail when there are new comments on your blog.

5. WordPress Thread Comment
This plugin will allow your readers to reply to comments that are left by your readers on your blog. It is a great way to increase the discussion and get your readers to connect with one another. Word of caution: One must monitor your blog more often to make sure that people aren't attacking your commentators. My current solution is to review each comment manually to avoid such things. However, one my blog starts to receive tons of comments, I will need a better solution.

Hope this blog post was helpful to you, "WordPress Plugins that Promote Comment Participation" Be sure to share this post with your friends on Twitter. Furthermore, I appreciate your time that you have spent here!

Spunky Jones.

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