WordPress is one of the most popular blogging software platforms available because it is easy to use and easy to customize. You can find WordPress on literally millions of sites across the world featuring topics on jus about anything imaginable. So it is interesting to see what sets apart the most successful blogging sites and makes them more popular in their genre than others in the same category. One of the ways to do this is to encourage visitors to have a sense of community and a stake in the site. This promotes loyalty and entices the user to recommend the site elsewhere to their friends, family and coworkers.
A great way to instill a sense of community is to encourage interactivity by allowing user posts and user comments. If you can get your visitors participating, you can grow your site exponentially. Encourage your users to comment regularly. Encourage them to share posts. You may even want to encourage a select few to become guest contributors for regular posts or columns. Follow these 5 tips for getting your visitors commenting on your WordPress site:
- Use your regular posts to encourage comments and opinions from your visitors. At the end of a blog post you create ask some pointed questions that you want your visitors to answer pertaining to your post. Specifically ask your visitors to post their comments, suggestions and feedback. Simply asking for comments will encourage them. Also, make sure you feature some of the top rated comments as well as top rated posts on your front page. When you have particularly interesting posts and comments on your front page new visitors will be enticed to read and participate.
- Display comments for others to see. Just looking at your words will likely get the comments starting but when visitors see others’ posts and comments that ill get everyone talking and participating as well. You will have plenty of users commenting back and forth to one another as well as interacting with you. Also, if you have an easy to use way for sharing posts and comments you can use your visitors to advertise for you. Encourage post sharing at social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
- Come up with fun polls and encourage discussion of the results. Polls are a fun, quick and entertaining way to get your visitors interacting with the community. You can see poll results and discuss whether or not the results were expected or not and what the outcome means. Use your front page to feature poll results that can be clicked on to see the results and encourage commenting.
- Don’t be afraid of controversy. The more enticing the subject, the more people will be apt to comment on the subject. Boring topics will evoke boring comments or worse yet, none at all. However, if you have controversial, poignant, interesting or recent news items you will have a lot of people who want to get their opinion out to the public as well. You may find that a particular topic draws a lot of attention and see a spike in visitors as people share your topic elsewhere.
- Pick out a few regular posters who seem to have a following and ask them to contribute weekly topics and posts themselves. You can make them featured writers and give them a forum for their work. You can even get creative with contests to encourage additional participation and even a bit of competition.
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Get your WordPress Blog Visitors Involved: Five Tips to Get them Participating
WordPress is one of the most popular blogging software platforms available because it is easy to use and easy to customize. You can find WordPress on literally millions of sites across the world featuring topics on jus about anything imaginable. So it is interesting to see what sets apart the most successful blogging sites and makes them more popular in their genre than others in the same category. One of the ways to do this is to encourage visitors to have a sense of community and a stake in the site. This promotes loyalty and entices the user to recommend the site elsewhere to their friends, family and coworkers.
A great way to instill a sense of community is to encourage interactivity by allowing user posts and user comments. If you can get your visitors participating, you can grow your site exponentially. Encourage your users to comment regularly. Encourage them to share posts. You may even want to encourage a select few to become guest contributors for regular posts or columns. Follow these 5 tips for getting your visitors commenting on your WordPress site:
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