What kind of people comment on blogs?

Have you ever wandered why some blogs generate huge number of comments on every single article while others get just few? Reasons may vary, but I think it is not related solely to articles quality neither to website PR and traffic. Although I admit that these factors are important, they are not the main reason of receiving comments. For example: Traffic matter, but it is not that huge different in amount of comments if the website gets 1000 or 1500 visitors per day.

So what is the main reason that some blogs are commented much more?
It is the “quality of visitors” what makes the difference. Most of readers are lazy ones, they never comment because they have “their reasons”. If you ever wanted to know which 5 most common reasons of no commenting are, just read further:

• People usually don’t have time to contribute and comment. Especially if readers want to write meaningful comment it can easily take 10-20 minutes.

• Shyness of people. It is like in the school there are always the same people who raise their hands and answer the questions, although there are many others who know the right answer, but simply don’t want to tell it on public.

• You can see many similar topics written on many blogs over and over again. Readers are less interested in commenting over-saturated themes, because it seems like everything was already said.

• Readers have nothing valuable to say, so they stay quiet.

• Fifth reason is not connected to the readers, it is an issue of busy blog authors. Many blog authors miss their moderator role in comments. They usually don’t respond to comments because of no time, visitors are discouraged to comment because they see author don’t care.

Who are “quality visitors”?
In previous part I was talking about most common reasons why so many blogs get small amount of comments. Now let’s move to the 4 most valuable groups of readers who are not influenced by these reasons and usually generate up to 90% of blog comments.

1. Subscribers and regular readers. These are the people who like your website content and follow your updates regularly. These readers generate the major amount of quality comments on the blog.

To capture the attention of these visitors is usually a big challenge, because they are mostly experienced people who are looking for blogs with excellent content.

2. It is always about what you give and what you get. This applies to blog comments as well, therefore the second group of quality visitors are “backlink seekers.” These people post comments because of backlinks they receive from dofollow blogs. Comment links from dofollow blogs count into their Google PR.

So if you have listed your website in many dofollow blog directories, you can easily gain many comments although you have low traffic.

Main advantage of backlink seekers: If this kind of visitors find your website, you may be almost sure that they will leave at least one comment.

Main disadvantage of backlink seekers: The primer object of these people is to get backlinks, therefore the comments quality is usually lower.

3. Friends. We count here relatives, real life friends or online friends. These people will comment because they know you, they usually don’t carte that much what are your articles about. Therefore if you want to raise the number of comments, don’t hesitate to spread your blog link among people you know personally.

4. “Don’t agree” readers. If readers have the same opinion as author they usually don’t feel the urge to tell that to the world. But if readers believe author’s opinion is wrong or missing important part of the topic, they are more willing to share it through comments. Good tip is to write about controversial topics which can help to get attention of “don’t agree” visitors.

These are the most common groups of people who are commenting. If the website visitors consist mainly from these groups of people, the amount of comments is usually high.

If you think there are also other important groups of people who comment which I forgot to mention, or you think my opinion is completely wrong, please let me know through comment form:)