To start off with this should not be confused with our other post entitled, “How to turn your WordPress site into a social network”. This post aims to provide you with the resources to increase activity between you, your reader and your members.

Increasing visitor activity on your website has many benefits. Firstly it creates a sense of “buzz” for new visitors, which immediately tells them that other readers have found your blog interesting and informative. Secondly, similar to “buzz”, engagement breeds engagement, which effectively means that apart from wanting to find information as quickly as possible, readers want to engage with other readers, and will do so if a simple and effective opportunity is provided to them.

Ways to to increase member engagement:

1. Comment Management and Promotion

The most basic ideas are usually the ones that are most effective. To increase the likelihood of readers commenting on your blog posts you have to promote your comment section and KISS. You can do this by having a clean and inviting comment section by using bright clear colors, using graphics to “point” to the comment form or simply asking users to comment.

To increase commenting and discussions further you can provide incentives and better comment management systems provided by various WordPress plugins.

1. CommentLuv

CommentLuv is a great way to increase the amount of comments you receive on your blog as it provides a clear and measurable incentive to all your blog visitors and other blog owners.

Reward your readers by automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment. Encourage a community and discover new posts. - Author

2. IntenseDebate Comments

InteseDebate Comments is the big-daddy of comment management and promotion plugins for WordPress. You will have to setup an account at IntenseDebate.com, which integrates with the WordPress plugin, but it only takes a few minutes and is definitely worth it.

Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you! - Author

3. Simple Top Commenters

This is an obvious way of increasing your blog comments as it gives some love to your commenters, which everyone wants.

A sidebar widget that displays a list of top commenters across a site, showing the number of comments for each. Inspired by and extended from the Top Commentators Widget by WebGrrrl. - Author