If your blog is hosted on Blogger and you do not receive many comments – this might be the reason why.
Under the blog settings tab – there is a section called Comments (click the picture for a larger view).
By default the “Who Can Comment” section is set to “Registered Users”. This only includes people who have Google, AIM, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress.com, or OpenID accounts.
But a very large number of potential commenters have self hosted blogs that are not part of any of these services. You may argue that surely, the commenter has one of these accounts – whether or not their site is actually hosted there. And yes that is probably true.
But I know from experience that when I take the time to leave a thoughtful comment – I want both the author and readers of that blog to be able to find me at my online home. That is the whole premise behind the blogosphere – encouraging conversations.
Luckily there is a simple solution to this problem. Simply change the settings to “Anyone” – like this (click the image to get a bigger view):
Now – anyone can leave a comment either anonymously or with a name/url of any other site, regardless of where it is hosted.
If you are worried about spam – don’t. In Blogger settings – you can turn on moderation, where you will receive an email and be able to approve each comment before it is published. Or if this is too tedious – you can at least require word verification – where the commenter has to type in a captcha image before the comment can go live.
This is a small price to pay for the increase in comments and potential traffic that you will receive to your website.
I for one, do not leave comments on Blogger blogs if they only allow registered users. And I find this to be a shame.
Also – I am a big advocate of the SITS girls – a site dedicated to increasing traffic via conversation. Yet I find that many of the ladies that participate have restricted commenting options.
Please check out your settings – you may inadvertently turning valuable traffic away.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Twitter: mpolicha
July 13, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Interesting article. I’ve run into restrictive blogger comment schemes before. Like many self-hosted WP users I’m a member of WP.com, but I don’t use the account very often, and I don’t know the username and password by heart. When faced with the prospect of going digging for it, I usually just don’t comment.
Which comes to the point of your post. If you’ve got someone who is ready to comment, the last thing you want to do is discourage them by making them jump through hoops! So maybe you’ll get a bit more spam–that’s the price you pay for openness.
Twitter: jadedickinson
July 27, 2010 at 9:54 am
Oh I am so with you on this one – drives me crazy, I did a post about this previously too.
I hate the anti-spam words that appear after you submit your comments, so many comment I’ve left have never been submitted this way because I’ve clicked away without noticing it!