There are two reasons that people will visit your website.
They\’ll visit to read great content. And they\’ll visit to feel part of a community.
There\’s one way in which you can add valuable content to your site, get that content for free and build up your community at the same time.
By receiving comments.
Comments are an important part of any website. They let readers interact with you and with each other. They give you feedback on the content you\’re producing. They show people who are reading your site and what they think of it.
And here\’s the important thing… they supply valuable information that you couldn\’t get any other way.
If you\’ve written a post about photographing lightning, for example, you might well get a response from a professional photographer explaining how he sold his lightning photos. That would be a great addition to your post. It would enhance the value of the information you\’re providing and it wouldn\’t have cost you a penny.
But comments like these tend not to just happen by themselves. First, you\’ll need lots of users and especially the sort of users with good knowledge to share. That comes with good traffic generation.
Then you\’ll need to encourage them.
That\’s a lot easier. At the end of each post, you should make a point of writing a sentence that invites responses. The easiest way to do that is simply to ask a question related to the topic of the post.
So the publisher who had written about photographing lightning could end the post by asking: \”What are your techniques for photography lightning and how do you sell the images you create? Tell us here.\”
If you can make it easy for your users to respond, more of them will.
Getting comments that tell you what a great post you\’ve written is all very nice. But getting comments that add nice things to your post will bring users back, increase your traffic and give you more clicks on your ads.