Fake it Til You Make it on WordPress

Today, we are in a world of social media and viral marketing. If you trust Seth Godin, you know this already. If you don't trust him (or know who he is), then you're probably not into marketing anyways. But if you want to get attention for your business or yourself online, the most valuable advice to heed is this: people like trustworthy people.

What does this mean for a blogger? Be a real person. No machine-generated content, no faceless anonymity, and no undisclosed endorsements. Many companies have ignored the third word, and simply fired off employees to write shining reviews on every website around. They didn't disclose themselves as employees or otherwise biased, and people no longer trust them.

Another problem that causes low readership is the absence of community. People want to participate and a lack of participation is not a good way to paint yourself as trustworthy. If you use WordPress, these tips are meant for you. These problems are common to most blog systems, but I have no experience with most of them, so you're on your own.

First, clean up. Do you have that RSS badge in your sidebar, proudly proclaiming that you have 3 subscribers? Remove it. If you have less than 1,000 subscribers and your audience isn't easily impress, then it's doing more harm than good. How about that "Most Recent Comments" plug-in? Did the most recent comment happen in the last 24 hours? If not, remove it. This will also do more harm than good if your community isn't incredibly active.

Now, if you've got no comments on any of your posts, you have two choices, depending on what kind of traffic you're getting. If you get few visitors and none of them are commenting, close your comments immediately. People unable to comment looks a lot better than people not wanting to comment. First, build up your readership (linking to your articles from elsewhere without spamming means is a good start) and only then enable comments and switch to the tips below.

If, however, you have no comments, but you're getting a lot of viewers (this can range between 50 per day for blogs about hot-button topics politics to 1,000 per day for more "boring" subjects), then you're probably doing something wrong. Don't close your comments, but there are things you can do:

• Ensure comments are truly enabled.
• Test your comment form while logged out. You can just delete your comment and keep it from showing.
• If you have a display underneath each post on the front page saying "No comments" or similar, change the text to "Please leave a comment" or "Be the first to comment." Anything will work, just include an action word. The modifications can be done under your theme's index.php page. Open up the editor, select that file, and after comments_popup_link, before the first comma, within the quotes, add your desired text. If you need help with this process, please feel free to contact me.
• When writing posts, write your conclusions in such a way to encourage comments, with questions. "What do you think about this?" will suffice, but try to be more creative.
• Write occasionally about more heated topics.
• If you write educational posts, especially lists, leave something obvious out. People will feel more inclined to comment if they have a really simple, productive contribution. Thank them very politely and update your post with an attribution ("Thanks, reader"). If you do this, commenting will feel less daunting and they'll feel they are important.
• Consider offering an incentive like a monthly competition rewarding the most-insightful commenter with a featured post, including a do-follow link to his or her blog. If you have many commentators, consider upping the amount of winners or the frequency of the competition (weekly should be good enough). There are plug-ins for this, too, though they base it on quantity, not quality, so keep that in mind.
• If you don't want to run a competition, switch your commenter's URLs to do-follow. Inform them of this action, and include it on your About page (You do have an About page, right?). Note: this will encourage more spam, so post and enforce rules, and make sure you use Akismet or similar.

Now, this is my advice, and also the advice of most professional bloggers. I do understand that not everything will be applicable to everybody (I still don't follow half of these; I'm far too busy). Take a few and apply them, and I promise you will see an improvement.

So, how do you attract more comments to your articles? Is there anything I'm obviously missing in my list?