I have already discussed a few techniques and plugins you can use to increase your comments. Here is a re-cap of some old and some new plugins I haven’t discussed before. All are must-haves if you want to explode your comments:

1. Subscribe To Comments
   I am absolutely staggered that so many bloggers don’t use this one. Don’t they want their commenters coming back? When I comment on a blog, I really want to know when there is a reply. And subscribe to comments is the perfect plugin as it sends me an email whenever a comment is posted.

   Without this option, your commenters may just get sick and tired of checking manually or not bother at all. Not everyone subscribes to the comments RSS feeds so make sure you provide this option.

   I cannot stress this one enuff!

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You have to motivate your visitors to leave comments.

How do you do that?
By giving them a good enuff reason to do so.

Like they say there is no such thing as a free lunch.

We have already discussed one approach and that is by making your blog do-follow.

Another option is the CommentLuv Plugin.

This plugin searches the commentator’s RSS feed and adds the title of their last blog post to their comment.

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WordPress, by default adds a no-follow tag to links in comments.

What that means in very simple terms is that a Search Engine Bot should not follow that link. Your commentator receives no link benefit from this and gets no page rank credit from Google. The reason why this is a default action in WordPress is to combat comment spam, to stop people from leaving meaningless comments just to get a link back to their websites.

However, all this does is inconvenience the real posters who are genuinely contributing to the discussion. The no-follow tag has not served its pupose and has not stopped spam flooding your comments. Best option is to just use the Akismet plugin (comes with WordPress) for that and be done with it.

So let’s come back to the people who are contributing effectively to a discussion on your blog. Why are they being punished? They are giving something, they should get something back. It is a fair exchange. And it is a win-win situation as you can be at the receiving end as well by posting comments on blogs that do-follow links.

So from today onwards, this blog is officially a DO FOLLOW blog.

You can use a very simple, set it and forget it plugin called Semiologic Do-Follow

You can add your do-follow blog to this list.

There is a list of more plugins as well as directories you can add your do-follow blog to. Check it out.