By Joan Stewart<\/p>\n
One of the biggest frustrations of blogging is seeing too few comments at your blog—or no comments.<\/p>\n
Here’s one way to encourage comments. Don’t require people to first log in.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Because I’ve\u00a0created Google Alerts<\/a>\u00a0for my Publicity Hound website URL<\/a>\u00a0and my name, Google alerted me this morning to\u00a0a blog post someone had written about me, with a link back\u00a0to my website. Love it!\u00a0<\/p>\n I wanted to post a comment and leave one or two more tips for her readers. But then I saw that her blog requires me to sign in first.\u00a0I couldn’t remember my Google or WordPress passwords. I was in a hurry. So I guessed incorrectly.<\/p>\n Finally, I became so frustrated I just left. What a missed opportunity!<\/p>\n I see this mistake repeatedly on blogs that use Google’s\u00a0Blogger\u00a0platform. Here’s an explanation<\/a>\u00a0of various options you can give your visitors when theycome to your Blogger blog.<\/p>\n Different platforms handle this differently. My partner, Jeanne Hurlbert, and I use WordPress for this blog and I use it for my own blog.<\/a>\u00a0WordPress\u00a0doesn’t make a commenter do\u00a0anything more than type their comment,\u00a0name,\u00a0email address and\u00a0URL.<\/p>\n A few weeks ago,\u00a0blogging expert Patsi Krakoff was my guest expert during a teleseminar on Time-saving Tips for Smart Business Blogging<\/a>. Patsi says requiring people to log in before commenting drives her nuts, too:<\/p>\n “Lord knows it’s hard enough to build up enough traffic and get comments. Only 1 to 2 percent\u00a0of blog readers will leave a comment, it’s estimated. So why would you want to scare someone away?\u00a0 Or worse, just frustrate the hell out of ’em and waste their time?\u00a0 Good way to ensure they never come back.”<\/p>\n Because I know the blogger in question is one of my loyal readers, I emailed her and told her about the problem. She\u00a0fixed it immediately and thanked me profusely.<\/p>\n Now, I’m headed back over to her blog to comment.<\/p>\n Other bloggers won’t be as\u00a0lucky.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Joan Stewart One of the biggest frustrations of blogging is seeing too few comments at your blog—or no comments. Here’s one way to encourage comments. Don’t require people to first log in.\u00a0\u00a0 Because I’ve\u00a0created Google Alerts\u00a0for my Publicity Hound website URL\u00a0and my name, Google alerted me this morning to\u00a0a blog post someone had written\u2026 Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","iawp_total_views":10,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[638],"tags":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-14272","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-social-media","7":"tag-blogging","8":"entry"},"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Joan Stewart","author_link":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/author\/jstewart\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}