I recently posted about my excitement of seeing this blog reach the one thousand comments mark, and I wanted to go back and highlight a few things which I think could help bloggers figure out what seems to work, and what doesn’t.

World Problogger List – 60 Comments
15 Amazing Women in Blogging – 57 Comments
46 Things to Do Before Launching a Blog Network – 36 Comments
Cons of Being a Problogger – 24 Comments
Free WordPress Theme: Crystal – 24 Comments
My Problogging Setup – 23 Comments
Best Blogs Period – 19 Comments

From the list above you can see that list posts have done well for me, and that creating something new has done the best. WordPress themes are still a great way to gain attention, as well as pointing out your favourite sites. I also recommend mini-contests with a very low barrier for entry, as they seem to inspire people to both comment, and to link to your blog. The lower the barrier for entry, the more entries you will get. My recent domain giveaway doesn’t follow this rule, but I think the prizes are worth a bit of extra effort.

Another interesting statistic that I have found on this blog is that around 50% of all my comments come from the same handful of people. This means that they interact with this site on a fairly regular basis or did at one time. It also shows that, at least on this blog, if they come back and comment more than once, they seem to come back fairly often, or give their opinions on a variety of posts.

I am unsure if some are just hoping for traffic benefits as many of the repeat comments come from people authoring blogs in a similar niche, but I enjoy the regulars that come back more than once, despite knowing they are most likely ad blind or not clicking on ads.

I don’t have a plugin installed right now to tell me how many comments the “most commented” user has, but I would hazard a guess that it is Tom, a friend of mine from Ottawa who currently has 42 comments on this blog.

A side note for those that are interested, comments appear to have dropped considerably since I have stopped pushing my posts on social media sites. So that means my Alexa and Technorati Ranks as well as comments per month are all down since I stopped heavy promotion of this blog.

Originally posted on March 27, 2008 @ 12:20 pm