How to Encourage Audience Engagement after you install CommentLuv

While I normally write about all kinds of travel-related topics (like uncovering hidden gems most people haven’t even heard of and posting a plethora of high-resolution photos) over at Byteful Travel, I’ve been meaning to write something specifically for the ComLuv community for a while now. When I first heard that Andy was making guest posting an option, I thought that was pretty cool, but I wasn’t going to submit anything unless I knew that I had something truly pertinent to share with you all. And today I’m very excited to share with you something extremely pertinent: a subtle yet very powerful insight about audience engagement that you can put into action today.

To be painfully honest, this article has been simmering in my head for probably a month now, but the time to write it never felt right, until now. In fact, about 3 minutes ago, I was rinsing some brown rice and prepping the rice cooker. And now I’m sitting here in front of my Mac typing like a crazyperson.

Let’s begin with the Big Question

Are you doing everything you can to engage and interact with your audience?

Like you probably have already, I’d installed ComLuv and had it running on my site for a few years now. And it was (and is) fantastic! I saw my commenting increase, and it even seemed like the mere presence of ComLuv left my visitors in a better mood, too. (Perhaps because they knew commenting on my site would reap more rewards than on a site without ComLuv.) Indeed, ComLuv is, in the immortal words of that hilarious Don King impersonator on Conan, truly splendubious. (go 2 minutes into the video and you’ll see what I mean ;))

But CommentLuv alone wasn’t enough.

Missing out on a Huge Opportunity

This year, I took a long hard look at how my site Byteful Travel was actually being used. I realized that, though ComLuv was running smoothly and certainly helped, I was missing out on another ginormous opportunity to encourage my readers to comment. After really empathizing with my readers and putting myself in their shoes, I realized that I’d overlooked a key aspect in how people actually behave on real websites.

You see, I use a really clean and polished theme for WordPress called K2 (which I love), but I realized that I hadn’t done a good job of configuring K2 to encourage comments. Here was the problem: if you were on Byteful Travel’s main page earlier this year, the only way to comment on an entry was to either:

A. Click the title of the article to get to the article’s page itself and then scroll down to comment.
or
B. Click the word “comments” under the title. (the text is tiny at 11 pixels high)

Not exactly urging people on, was it? I mean, who’s going to click on the title of the post if they can already see the entire post on the main page? And not many people are going to be looking for a small comment indicator under the title itself.

ComLuv is a great way to encourage commenting, but how can it help if your readers have troubling finding your comment form in the first place?

Placement is Everything

I knew that in order to encourage the everyday reader to start commenting,

I had to put a reminder to comment at the bottom of each article. Putting a comment indicator on the top might look aesthetically pleasing and result in a clean layout, but it is simply not an easy way for people to comment.

So I had to dive in.

Luckily, I didn’t have to dive in nearly as deep as the time I added the print button (which is an entirely different and rather crazy story); but I did get to play with variables. And aren’t variables fun?

Here’s what I did:

1. I logged into my WordPress back-end, clicked on “Appearance”, and clicked on “K2 Options”. (Your theme will most-likely have a similarly-named page to setup its settings.)
2. I scrolled down to “Post Entry” and below it were a field called “Top Meta” and a field called “Bottom Meta”. Clearly these text boxes set how the meta information (like the comment indicator, for instance) would appear at the top and the bottom of each entry.
3. After experimenting a while, I settled on changing my “Bottom Meta” tags to:
   Currently %comments% - But what do you think?

Note: If you’re a stylesheet freak like me and you’re comfortable with PHP, you may also want to open up your single.php and loop.php files, find the “entry_meta” php tag, and wrap that tag in a new style class. That way you can set this new “Comment Encourager” any color or style that you want. (If none of that made sense, don’t worry about it. It’s just for style freaks. This tip works great either way.)

Voila!

That wasn’t too hard, was it? Now when anyone visits my page, a short reminder to comment is placed at the bottom of each article, whether they’re on the front page or on an article page. Placing “Currently X Comments – But what do you think?” at the bottom of each article makes it much easier (not to mention much more straightforward) for people to leave comments on Byteful Travel since the word “comments” is a link right to the comment form, so it’s easy as cake.

When you do a lot of webwork, you may forget that not everyone is as web savvy as you. I know because I fall into that trap from time to time. And while any web savvy person could figure out how to comment even without this change, putting a comment link at the bottom of an article is the easiest way for an average reader to figure out what to do next, so it makes a huge difference. You can even include a little message to encourage people to comment as I have. The main lesson here is that it’s absolutely paramount that you consider how “normal” human beings are going to use your site. Once you understand that, you can figure out how to encourage them to participate in a very natural way.

Obviously this isn’t rocket science, but combined with ComLuv, this technique is the best way to encourage commenting that I know of. And of course, you can see all of this in action, as well as join me on my adventures around the world, over at Byteful Travel.

Any questions or concerns? Please feel free.