I love my commentators like you do. In fact everyone does. You, Me and All. They share their thoughts and ideas despite their busy schedule. At points, they even criticize your work and that makes you to counter-reply with your explanation. This adds a lot to the community. Unfortunately, I’ve seen many bloggers or webmasters who never return anything to them. Most of the times they don’t even reply back to the commentator. That is not called loyalty. If your visitors can take their time to leave a comment to your post, then in return they deserve a reply, if not anything, at least a reply comment saying – “Thanks for leaving your comment”. The people who leave comments give suggestions, solutions, feedback and many more through their comments; no doubt that it makes the post or article active and boosts it. And remember an active community is the best thing that a blogger can crave for.
Below are few ways to show your gratitude towards your commentators:
- Top Commentators Widget –
- Comment Luv Plugin –
- Sidebar Banner –
- Thank Me Later –
- Email Commenters –
- Becoming Do Follow Friendly / No Follow Free -
- Recent Comments Widget -
This is an excellent plugin available as a widget to showcase your top commentators. It shows a list of the top commentators in any of your theme widget areas. The Top Commentators Widget is highly customizable with a lot of options like showing avatar, number of comments left by the commentator, a do-follow/no-follow link to his blog/site and many others.
You can check this widget in action at Incrediblogger (here), Technshare and more.
This is by far one of my favorite wordpress plugins. Once activated, this plugin visits the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their latest blog posts from a choice of 10 posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit. It is found to increase comments and a feeling of community spirit among commentators on the blogs who use this plugin.
You can check this plugin in action at Shout Me Loud, Technshare,OrangeCopper, and more.
You can also reward your top commentator with a 125 x 125 ad spot in the sidebar. So you keep allocated a banner of the top commentator of the month. I think your commentators will love this gift and I’m really thinking to implement this soon.
This is another of my favorite plugins, but is a bit controversial. This plugin sends thank you emails to readers after they post a comment. The problem with this plugin is – according to laws of some countries; this kind of “thank you” email is considered as spam. So, use it wisely.
Another great plugin by Yoast. This plugin comes handy when you want to e-mail an update to that post to all the people who commented on a certain post. This is again a bit controversial and is considered as spamming by some countries. But yeah it definitely helps you to keep your commentators up-to date about the post they commentated and thus build the community feeling.
Comment(s) placed in a Do Follow blog are considered as a backlink. If you really love your commentators then you should really show some love by using do-follow links for their blog/site. Bad thing about this plugin is that once people know that your blog is Do Follow and you get noticed by spammers, you’ll be flooded by spam comments. So the first thing to do is install an Anti-Spam plugin like Akismet or Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin (GASP). GASP is another great plugin by Andy Bailey who is the author of Comment Luv Plugin. The second thing to do is specify a certain number of comments by an author after which all his links will become do follow.
Many blog owners fail to realize the importance of this. By displaying the recent comments, you indeed help drive traffic to your other pages/posts.
Share your ways to reward commentators with us.
But then again there are sites like Famousbloggers who allow do-follow links for your comments. Moreover the comments appear mostly on the single entry posts apart from any widget that you might be using sitewide. So it should not leak much of link juice I believe.
many webmsters beileve they are leaking their page rank doing this so maybe they don;t dofollow the comments
i heard a very populr blog named hellboundbloggers dropped from pr 3 to pr 0…maybe this could have been the reason, i m not sure 
What a great article. Really helpful and thorough. Thank you very much. I already have the recent comments widget up prominently as the very first widget on the sidebar. As my blog grows bigger, I’d like to plug in the top commentators. Nobody has been able to tell me how to make disqus do-follow.
Hi Pundit,
Glad to see your first comment here after a series of mail exchanges that we had earlier. The extent to which you can customize your blog is practically endless. I can’t help you in making disqus do-follow since I’ve never personally used it. Hope the plugin developers can help.
I hope your doubt’s with the KeywordLuv and CommentLuv plugins are clear now and yeah sorry that I could not write a dedicated post explaining about CommentLuv and KeywordLuv for you.
Keep commenting and you might get one of the 125×125 ad spots on my right sidebar for being the top commentator of the month.
Thanks,
Prasenjit.
Ooh, now that’s a good bribe!
Ok, you’re on. I’m going to spend the next half hour reading and commenting here. Ready, set, go!
Thats good PC. Anyways send me a 125×125 ad banner for your site. You already were at the top of the list last month i.e. for the month of April.
Cheers,
Prasenjit.
The commentators take their time for commenting on our blog and encouraging discussions so it our duty to reward them. I already use the Top commentator widget and Commentluv plugin. I am also planning to give a 125×125 ad space for the top commentator.
Nice post Prasenjit
Hey Rojish,
Thanks for dropping by and leaving the comment. The Top Commentator Widget and CommentLuv are awesome plugins. Even I find the KeywordLuv plugin a very useful way to return back the commenters.
Glad that you liked my post.
Thanks,
Prasenjit.
Great post. I must check out the Thank me Later plugin. I often come across blogs I like & leave comments but they never reply to my comments or visit my site. After a while I don’t bother with them anymore. I feel it’s important to interact with your visitors.
I use Commentluv, GASP, Top Commentator widget, a Commentator of the Week 125×125 ad, recent comments widget, do follow plugin. I feel that these are all must haves.
Thanks Tony for your comment. The Thank me later (TML) plugin is really a must have and it make a good impression on the commentators in most cases. Like I always said, that CommentLuv from Andy is one of the most loved plugins among bloggers who want to build a network.
Cheers,
Prasenjit.
I would like to say that I use the methods of rewarding commentators which are described in this post and they are really very and very effective. Acting in such a way, each blogger and online entrepreneur can increase activity on a blog signifficantly.
Thanks Terje for supporting my points. By the way which method works for you the best?
I think it’s important to encourage comments. It really builds a community and makes a blog site come alive with ideas and discussions. My favourite is the CommentLuv plugin, you get a lot of great comments once you’ve implemented that.
Thats right. Thanks Charlotte for commenting.
Hi Prasenjit
In my opinion All the mentioned above plugin + Notify reply comment plugin (which helps in sending email when that comments get reply) will help users to leave comment. Also when the writer try to replay comment (as you are doing in this blog) it also helps user to leave comment.
I think 125 banner not much helpful in my point of view.
P.K.ARUN
Hey Arun,
Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I had never heard of the Notify reply comment plugin and just now visited the wordpress plugin repository, but could not find which plugin you’re talking about. Can you kindly paste the link to the plugin page?
125 banner is definitely helpful. You might think that it is not much beneficial because probably you did not get good click through rate (CTR). See, the effectiveness of any text/banner ad depends on the placement and the color combination of your site. So try experimenting with your layout to find out where you get the best CTR.
In my point of view it is must have plugin for every blog.
Developer site:
http://theme10.com/comment-reply-notification/
And may I know which plugin you are using for sending newsletter? It looks like you are using some plugin instead of service. And also at the header you are display some msg which plugin you are using for that?
For sending newsletter I use only feedburner and for lead generation I use WP Subscibers plugin. The header bar is created using the WP Subscribers plugin.
You can check out Hellobar or ViperBar.
Interesting article.
I’ve used GASP previously and found that it isn’t all that great. But, to each his own! I think i’ll try the Sidebar Banner!
Thanks Yash for your comment.
I think this is very good to reward your commentators. It builds a strong relationship!!!!!!!!
Right. Apart from relationship, I believe thats a way to showing love to my readers and commentators.