Admittedly, this is not a problem we have around here.

Our readers are so spectacularly awesome that they CONSTANTLY leave comments on our threads, and it’s not easy to keep up with them all!  Seriously, you guys are comment MACHINES, and we love you for it.

Seriously, we do.  Nothing makes blogging feel better than to know you’re doing some kind of good somewhere.  If your humor blog is making people laugh or your philosophy board is making them think or if your blog mechanics board is giving people new and useful ideas that they want to try themselves, the whole process just FEELS better.  You’re doing good in the world and that’s quite a reward.

But if your comments are falling off, what do you do?

You could try asking questions of your readers.  What would you like us to cover? is a great one.  What do YOU want to know?

Don’t tell anyone about this, but this approach serves two useful purposes.  One, it gets people engaged, and telling you what they want.  This in turn gives you a great excuse to PROVIDE it.  And when you provide what people want, you not only never have to find a blog idea again, you also make a whole lot of people very happy.

So next time you write a blog, be sure to ask your readers what they want.  It’ll give you ideas you never dreamed of.

And just to take my own advice–what do YOU guys want me to talk about?  Just hit the comments section and tell me what you want to see here!

So I was reading around like I do, and the crew out at seomoz gave me a great idea to whomp up and pass around to you.

No doubt many of you are seasoned blogging professionals.  This advice may not be so helpful to you.  But to those of you just getting started, consider this:  don’t let people comment on your blog.

You might wonder if this isn’t counterproductive.  Didn’t I, after all, spend several posts railing on the concept of building community?  I did, no mistake there, but if you’re too new to have a community, showing that you have no community makes your blog look weak and unprofessional.  So what they recommend you do is wait to add a comments section until you have one or both of the following:

1. At least one hundred RSS subscribers per day

2. At least seven hundred fifty unique visitors per day.

There’s definitely something to be said for keeping the lid on commentary until your audience justifies such a measure, though I’m not sure it’s the best.  After all, it does something of a disservice to your early readership, the ones you’re counting on most, to not allow them to comment on your posts.

And no, I’m not talking about the ones that lurk under the bridge and demand to be fed goats, I’m talking about internet trolls.

Chances are, most of us have run into the type before.  We’ve all seen the drunk guy at the party who can’t stop screaming no matter how much you tell him to shut up–well, the internet troll is this guy, the key difference being that he can actually now drink AND scream at the same time.  Plus, he doesn’t have to get up for work the next day, nor does he particularly care about leaving the party, and forget about calling the cops on this schlub.

So what can you do?  Well, sure, you can ban anybody you like from reading your site.  But getting rid of readers?  Of a lure for potential advertisers?  That’s counterproductive at best and suicidally stupid at worst.  The best thing you can do is either make the troll want to leave, or in the best case scenario, convince the troll to become another reader.  Here are some troll-busting strategies the next time your comments section gets infested by drooling screaming halfwits:

1. Take them seriously.  There are few things in life that make a troll less entertained by the world around him than to not be able to start a fight.  When someone in your blog leaves a comment like “D00D YR SITE SUXXORZ”, ask him why he thinks that.  Chances are he’ll never respond, and that’ll kill the troll in that thread.  Maybe even bring him around toward straight readership.

2. Ignore the unintelligible.  This is an easy one.  Pretend you don’t speak leet or any derivation thereto.  So when someone comes wailing in with their aggressive brand of internet speak, like you just saw above, pretend you didn’t see it.  Or failing that, ask if something is wrong with their translation software.  If you know any languages outside of your home language, offer to speak that instead to “make things easier”.

3, Respond only to comments you can read and understand.  This will go a long way toward baffling trolls–they love to rapidly sling pointless comments.

4. Understand their principle motivation.  All of the last three comments boil down to essentially one thing: trolls feed and thrive on attention.  Any time you can pull attention off the troll, by ignoring him or by refusing to take him seriously (I’m using the generic “he” here, trolls can also be women) you destroy his primary motivation.

These are just four simple ways that you can improve the community of your blog, as well as strike a blow for decency and morality in one clean and simple package.

Every blogger goes through this at one time or another–that horrible sinking feeling that, deep down, they’re really just screaming into an empty room.

Sure, traffic comes and traffic goes.  There’s even a good indication that people are reading your stuff and clicking your links.  But sometimes, it just feels insubstantial.  Incomplete.  So what do you do?  Take your act on the road, of course–down the information superhighway.

I know, a little outdated, but the metaphor fits.  Go to other people’s blogs.  Comment on them.  Talk to people there. Build a community.  It’ll help, and here’s how.

1. Commenting on other people’s blogs makes you more credible.  Again, back to credibility–if you’re seen as a person who knows what they’re talking about, no screaming, no ranting like a loon at every opportunity, then your opinion, your WORK (I really don’t consider the occasional caps screaming, more like emphasis without bothering with italics) more seriously.

2. Linking to other people’s blogs helps THOSE people find you.  When you put up a link, it’s like acknowledging someone else’s credibility.  That in turn helps that blog by letting a bit of your traffic go somewhere else.  Don’t worry, traffic isn’t a zero-sum game–traffic ebbs and flows.  But in turn, that makes other blogs more likely to link to you, and that keeps the flow moving.

3. Comments and links help establish your role in the community.  Remember that thing we did on blog carnivals?  About how they give you a place in a larger community?  Well, chances are your readers read other blogs too.  And if they go to those blogs, and talk about YOURS, you become part of a larger whole.  It’s about adding your own voice to the larger community and improving the whole as a result.

So if you want to make your blog bigger, go give some other people some blogging love.  It’ll help them, and it’ll help you.

Go to your website and try to leave a comment. What does it ask? Your name, your e-mail address, your website, etc. A lot of this information can be discouraging to the average Internet user.

Many comment forms make these forms optional, but many I have come across don’t allow you to post unless you have a valid e-mail address. This is a turn off because, initially, the first thing that comes to mind is the potential of incoming spam. Some assure you that you won’t receive any spam, but why go through all that trouble just to have your voice heard on some blog, right?

A lot of sites also require you to become a registered member of their site to do anything at all. While this may give slight chance for returning users, it’s not a concrete way to get started if your blog still has a small fan base. I, for one, would never register for a site just to comment. There would need to be a lot more incentive and have brilliant content.

Make it easier for your readers to comment your stories. A lot of blogging platforms allow you to edit how much information is required to submit a comment (e.g. WordPress), so take the time to tweak it to make it easier. A simple user interface change can go a long way.

You maybe aware of the technique of visiting other blogs and leaving comments, both because you want to get your voice heard in general and of course because it gives you an opportunity to leave a link to your blog and therefore drive traffic.

The trouble is with millions of blogs created everyday how do you find the blogs that are relevant to your particular niche.  Well you could go the old fashioned route and just spend hours online searching for them hoping to be able to separate websites from blogs.  The alternative is a to use two of googles tools that are designed to make things easier.

The first is Google Blog Search like the regular google search it has an advanced search option and this is what I recommend you use. By using the keywords that are most associated with your blog you can find similar blogs.

Likewise with google alerts, the good thing about google alerts is that once they are setup they do the work for you. Enter you keywords, choose the “Type” Blog, decide when you want the information delivered and you are away.

Both of these will help you uncover blogs that are in the same area as you and that are good candidates for your comments, maybe even for some mutual linking.

Everyone wants comments on their blog posts. But how much do you do to invite someone to leave a comment?

One of the easiest and most recognized ways to do it is to simply end your post with a question. After all what is more inviting than that? Make sure its an open ended question not just a closed, Yes / No type question.

But beyond that there are other things you can do within your post to leave room for your readers to comment. Firstly, don’t provide all the answers, even if you think you know them all.  Secondly, give your opinion on something, that is bound to provide someone the opportunity to either agree or disagree with you. Thirdly, admit when you haven’t tried or used something that you are writing about and invite users to submit their views based on experience.

Overall, the more interactive, the more conversational you make your blog posts the more likely you are to get a response.

So, what do you do to get comments?

Its nice to get comments when you make a post, gives you a sense that at least someone is reading what you write and after all isn’t that why you are writing.

Of course you know that you should respond to your comments, that’s just polite.  But do you ever take it one step further?

What about using the comments section of your blog as a resource for your blog?  Quite often the people who leave you a comment are bloggers too. So they may well have a good writing style - Guest Post Resource. They may have made a comment that inspired you to re-think an article you had written - Blog Post Inspiration. They maybe writing on a topic that compliments yours - Linkback Opportunity. 

Blog comments are much more than just a pat on the back for a nice post.  Go and take a look at all the comments you have acquired over the last few months and see what resources you can find.