When you first start blogging, getting new comments can be an exciting development. Not only does it let you know people are reading, but people are feeling the need to comment. Most importantly, the chance to build a brand and reputation is there. Building comments can be slow, and its not exactly an easy task for a new blog. Now that you know how to convice people to subscribe, its time to get some comments.

Be Direct And Ask For Comments
You can be direct as you want… For the most part people will actually respond as well. Ask our readers what they think, do they have something to add, or is there something you forgot to mention? Simple, but can be extremely effective.

Be Controversial
Controversial content can be a great way to get a reaction from people. And, if it becomes viral you can see a massive response of hundreds of comments. Naturally there will be some more aggressive comments but that’s part of the game, its up to you to decide whether or not censoring certain comments is necessary. I personally don’t censor anything unless it contains a lot of swearing, or anything explicitly adult. The idea is to have a debate going with both sides present.

Before I changed the focus of my blog I had done some posts about a Microsoft Xbox 360 contest called “X Marks The Spot.” Basically they would give you clues as to where you can find the green X’s and you had to find the word containing the green X. These words where spread across numerous websites. I thought it was to much of a pain in the ass so I built a SOAP protocol for the site. Microsoft for some reason did not feel the need to encrypt the list of answers so every night at midnight I would hop on and get the list within seconds then post it to my blog. The contest was like 60 days I think and within the first week I had over 1,300 comments on the 7 posts. By the end of the two months I had over 30,000 comments on my blog.

Offer Something For Comments
If can be frustrating having a large readership but no commenting. Contests are basically the bread and butter of incentivized commenting. Randomly selecting a comment very day, week, etc. for a prize can be very effective. You can offer cash, advertising, review services, tool access, eBooks, etc. A word of caution though: If your not careful on how often people can win you will most likely see an increase of useless + spammy comments.

Comment On Other Blogs
This seems to be a tip that I give in a lot of posts. It’s incredibly easy and it works so use it. Finding relevant blogs is easy as using Google or Technorati search. After you find some blogs make sure they will be easy to dominate comment wise. You want to make it to the top commentor position on blogs that have substantial traffic. Most people now have the Top Commentators plugin installed so this should not be a problem.