Reward your readers and strike up some conversation
Posted August 19th, 2009.
An integral part of any blog is its readers and the comments they leave. On top of your original post, comments add additional content and more importantly, an additional perspective on the subject at hand.
Here are a couple of plug-ins for your wordpress blog that will reward your readers for their thoughts, hopefully drum up a little more conversation for your blog and offer a little protection from spammers.
Lucia’s Linky Love
Typically links left by comment authors are flagged as “nofollow” as a means of discouraging spammers. Some blog authors simply do-follow their links in comments but this unfortunately makes you a target for spammers. Lucia’s Linky Love makes author links do-follow but with a options.
One such options is a minimum comment count. Linky Love has the option of following links from the same author only after they have posted 3 – 10 comments depending on your settings.
Spammers are just looking to drop a quick link and move on to the next site, with the minimum comment count set your site will hopefully be passed over by the spammers or at worst their hastily left comments will be easily recognized and can be deleted.
Comment Luv
Lucia’s Linky Love works well from an SEO point of view but is somewhat limited, it gives your readers a single back-link but no additional promotion, Comment Luv works differently. If your reader has a blog of their own, Comment Luv reads their RSS feed and posts a link to their latest blog article at the end of their comment.
This creates a call to action for your readers and if the linked article interests them, generates some traffic and potential comments for their own blog. This is more likely to generate targeted traffic rather than offering a single back-link only.
One little caveat however…
Any blog that traffic might be gleaned from is a potential target for spammers regardless of what reward you offer, as well as genuine comments you may attach some additional spam but hopefully the benefits will outweigh the risks.
I’m working on launching my first blogs at the moment and really like the Comment Luv idea. I’ve found plenty of interesting things from Comment Luv links left on blogs and hope to do the same through my own.
Good luck with your blog Alice, if your going to be running the wordpress platform you might also be interested in some of these plug-ins for your site.