Do you know who your best visitors are? Chances are they’re also your top commenters. People who take the time to not only read your blog, but leave comments as well. Considering that as few as 1% of your visitors are likely to comment at all these are people you want to hold on to.
At the recent Problogger Training Day held in Melbourne attendees were taught to build a loyal community of readers by reaching out to people who comment on your blog.
So how can you do this? Here are three easy ways.
Reply to Their Comments
This one is simple. When people take the time to comment on your blog you can simultaneously thank them and keep the conversation going by replying to them. I admit this one is tough sometimes. People don’t always leave comments that give you any way to respond other than to say “thanks” back to them.
There are other benefits to doing this. As Chris Garrett said, the easiest way to turn a post with 10 comments into a post with 20 comments is to reply to each of those 10 comments. That higher comment count may be just the thing that tells a new visitor that your blog is active and interesting.
Tip: turn on threaded comments for your blog if your theme supports them, it makes the conversations much easier to follow.
Comment on Their Blogs
If a commenter has included the URL to their own blog you can make their day by visiting them and leaving a comment on one of their blog posts as well. Not only are you making them happy, but you’re also commenting in front of their audience which may drive some more traffic to your own site.
If you’re looking for a way to track the effectiveness of your off-site commenting check out these comment link strategies.
Send Them an Email
Since every commenter leaves an email that you can see in your WordPress admin area, all you need to do is copy that and write a short note to say thanks or to compliment them on their comment, their blog, or any other message you want to send them.
If you’ve been blogging for a while now and haven’t already been doing this then you can find out who your best commenters are by querying your WordPress database.
Most web hosts will provide you with access to phpMyAdmin through CPanel (or whichever hosting control panel they offer you). With phpMyAdmin you can directly query your database for information.
Simply open up phpMyAdmin and select your WordPress database from the left hand side, then go to the SQL tab.
To get a simple list of all commentors email addresses you can run this SQL query (paste it into the field and click Go!).
SELECT DISTINCT comment_author_email FROM wp_comments;
That is useful but it might be a very long list, and doesn’t tell you who your top commenters are. To do that you can use a more advanced query instead.
SELECT COUNT(comment_author_email) as Comments,comment_author_email as Email,comment_author_url as URL FROM wp_comments GROUP BY Email ORDER BY Comments DESC;
That will output a list of all commenters, plus their blog URL if they left one, and sort them in order of most comments to least. You can export the results out to a spreadsheet by clicking the Export link at the bottom of the page.
Now you can use the spreadsheet to keep track of who you have and haven’t emailed yet.
So there are three ways you can reach out to your commenters and say thank you. Which of these do you plan to use on your own blogs?
Image Credit: Flickr
About Paul Cunningham
Paul,
I love the tip of using phpMyAdmin to query the database like that. Something so simple that I have never seen mentioned before.
Dave
Hi Dave, yeah it was a nice easy solution to my problem. I’ve got a long list of people to follow up with now :-)
I always try and respond to people who comment, I think its important that you create a conversation with them so that the comment section isn’t just lots of different ideas floating around, you need to build on those ideas with your readers so that they feel part of the website and are much more likely to come back.
Obviously its easy for me to keep up with comments at the moment because I don’t get many! haha
I agree with Dave, never thought of diving into phpMyAdmin to get email addresses in that way… Thanks for the tip!
I guess its even more important that you do it when you’re only getting a few comments. Mind you some bloggers manage to respond to hundreds of comments a day.
I’m determined to try and respond to everyone, no matter how many comments there are. Well, maybe not respond to the small comments which don’t really input.
I really liked this blog, especially using PHPMyAdmin to query your wordpress database and store the emails and urls of commenters in a spreadsheet. I’m looking for ways to have systems in place to streamline blogging. I got this link from probloggers tweets. If Darren Rowse recommends a blog, it is a blog worth looking at.
Nice of Darren to tweet this post, I’ll have to comment on his blog more often ;-)
Great advice, Paul.
I particularly agree with turning on threaded comments. I don’t know how many emails I’ve sent to site authors about how simple that is to do and yet what rewards you reap when you can reply directly to comments. Plus, it makes it so much easier to see the author’s replies (and if they do reply).
I never thought about how to find out the most frequent commenters, so thanks for that tip. It doesn’t look too complicated :-)
Thanks,
Karen
Hi Karen, did you know you’re my most frequent commenter? Thanks for contributing to the discussions here.
Gorgeous ideas, we do need to treasure and nurture our commenters. I also like to tweet at time thanking and often tweeting about something they’ve written if it’s topical. Plus I put a lovely plug-in on my blog that shows the recent commenters so they get to see their smiley faces on my blog. I think we all enjoy that, the more smiley faces the better:)
Yes, those tweets are a great idea. Nice way to connect with readers who have left comments.
For a long time, I would send every first time commenter a personal email as well as a reply to their comment. I got very busy for a while and stopped. I’ve started do it again though over the last month.
I return comments as I can. When I’m “blogging,” definitely. When I’m coding, probably not. The context switch is too costly. But I’m doing free software coding, so the karma balances. =)
It might make it a bit less personal, but I think there are plugins that can automated that follow up for you.
I have been thinking about sending an email to the people who comment on my blog, and this SQL query looks interesting, even though I really don’t like the thought of my doing anything related to MYSQL – it can’t possibly work, even though I get the exact instruction :)
I have also thought about finding a wordpress plugin that will do the same. Do you know if there is one?
There are some “top commenter” type plugins around that might do the job for you. In my case I wanted something that would give me an all time list of commenters for my blog (it is several hundred unique commenters long), not just the most recently active ones or anything like that.
The long way of doing it would be just to start with your most recent comments in the WordPress backend and work backwards from there :-)
I have been wondering how to get a list of the emails so I can send a message to my commentators. I didn’t know you could do it through MySQL and thought it had to be done with a plugin.
All the plugins do is hide the SQL for you so that it’s less techy and intimidating, actually!
Thanks for this SQL by the way, Paul. It’s very handy to have it around.
Cheers,
r
Hey nice tips. Commenting on their blog is a good gesture. I use the plugin “Thank me Later” for sending them emails, it makes it easier.!
I’ll have to look into that one, thanks for the tip.
Thanks for the good tips with the email extract using SQL. I’ll use it in the future.
I use the CommentLuv plugin that links to the latest post on a commenter’s blog. That way I can go to that post right away and leave a comment there.
I also use the Comment Email Responder plugin that sends an email to the commenter when I reply to their comment. The text of the reply is in the email too, so the commenter doesn’t need to guess which post comment I am replying to.
Hi Nate, Comment Email Responder sounds useful but I already offer a subscribe by email option on comments. I’ve seen a few blogs where they use both and find it a little annoying because I end up with TWO emails for comment replies.
thanks 4 the tip great advice
Good points, I hate it when the author doesn’t reply to questions/concerns in the comments section.
A little off topic, I think the colors you are using on the layout of this website are fantastic.
Very helpful information. I was struggling to find out how to harvest my commentators and email them en masse to thank them for their comments. This does the trick!