How to get more comments
People blog for different reasons, but many post with hopes of seeing feedback from readers. Here at WordPress.com we’ve studied why some posts and blogs get more comments than others, and want to share our advice with you.
- You need visitors before you’ll get comments. You won’t get comments until people visit your blog. Start by reviewing our famous post on How to Get More Traffic to understand the basics of building an audience. Posting on a regular schedule is an important part of building traffic, which will lead to more comments. You can see our recent research on increasing page views too.
- Have a clear and strong position in your posts. Clarity in writing helps readers form their own opinion to share. A post titled “I’m not sure if I like bananas” is less likely to compel a response than “How I learned to love bananas” or “Why I will never eat a banana again”. Writing well and having interesting thoughts is by far the best way to encourage more comments (and follow The Daily Post for regular advice on writing better). Being provocative, or picking polarizing topics, can help attract comments too, but be careful: the more intentionally provocative you are, the more polarized and uncivil the comments you receive are likely to be.
- Reply to every comment you receive. This rewards people for leaving a comment, and also shows new readers that you care about comments, encouraging them to leave one too. Be a good host: be more polite and forgiving than your visitors. WordPress.com allows you to reply to comments via email, a convenient way to keep conversations moving along.
- Ask your friends. If you are writing about a topic your friends are interested in, send them a link and ask them to comment. If you pick friends with blogs you can offer to return the favor. This ensures every post you make will get at least one comment, provided you’re willing to give one in return.
- Start conversations. In real life, most conversations start by reciprocation. “How is your day going?” “Fine. And you?”. In your post, don’t just offer an opinion. Supplement your point of view with invitations for other people to offer theirs. At minimum, end posts with a question inviting people to answer.
- Customize the comment prompt. The text that appears above the comment area is customizable. It says “Leave a Reply” by default but you can make it say whatever you like. We strongly recommend asking a question like “What do you think?” or “What is your opinion?” as questions are requests for people to respond. Go to Settings-Discussions to make the change.
- Write a response to another blogger’s post on your blog. By excerpting a small paragraph from another blogger’s post, and writing a response on your blog with a link back to their post, you invite them to visit your blog. WordPress.com automatically tries to contact their blog for you, letting them know you have linked to them. If what you say is interesting, they’re likely to comment, or at minimum, respond in a kind with a post on their blog. In both cases you’ll be starting a conversation which leads to more comments.
- Use WordPress.com’s discussion features. We’ve built in lots of goodness to help you start and grow conversations. If you go to Settings->Discussions you can find them all. Make sure you have it set to send you an email when you get a comment, so you can reply quickly. If you don’t get many comments, consider turning comment moderation off so comments appear immediately (if you have it set to email you when a new comment is left, you can always remove questionable comments quickly).
- Run a contest. Create ways to encourage first time commenters. After someone has left a first comment on your blog, it’s psychologically easier for them to leave a second one: they’ve broken the ice. Running a competition where you give a prize away, say a $25 amazon gift certificate, to a randomly chosen comment on a post, can encourage many first time commenters, as well as new readers to your blog
- Create interesting polls. It takes less effort for readers to make a choice in a poll than to write a comment. Use this to your advantage. The more people you get to participate in your polls, the more who will want to return to see the final results and have comments about them. Read about creating polls here.
- Tell relatable stories. A post where you offer a story that your readers can relate to invites participation. For example, if your blog is about baking cakes, and you share a story about how you messed up a recipe with disastrous yet entertaining consequences, it’s easy to ask readers to share their stories of similar disasters.
- Make a post out of the best comments from your readers. If you see a fantastic comment on your blog, create a post where you quote what they said (and link to their blog if they have one). Show your readers that you value and read their contributions, and more people will be motivated to comment in the future.
Also See The Daily Post’s advice on Comment Community, and our previous post on Comment Etiquette.
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I think I need more traffic first, spam-bots rarely post meaningful comments.
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Life designing with….. Blog’To get Shandar Life’ at http://www.lifedesignerdharmendrayadav.blogspot.com +919837154885
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Reblogged this on My spare time and commented:
Caranya dapat Komentar
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We’ve been doing all these, but somehow it’s not enough. 😦
Lucky are those who gets freshly pressed.
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Visit and comment on other blogs. If you love writing, you’ll surely love reading as well. People will reciprocate! 🙂
Destination Infinity
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That is excellent advice. Leaving thoughtful comments on blogs with similar themes to yours establishes your reputation, and helps draw that blogger, and his readers, to at minimum see what you’re up to on your blog, if not comment in kind.
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This is getting me excited to get to MY own blog space on my website. The points that I liked the best are: 1) excerpt someone else’s blog and link back to them, hopefully inviting them to come over to comment on yours, 2) and post comments or make a blog from the comments that others have made on your blog site, i.e. – your readers tell you what they want to hear and you can write about that! I have done that – I’ve visited a forum, read their comments from that forum ( or even from a chat room on your topic ) and compiled a blog from that. I got a lot of attention with that! Writers block isn’t permanent!
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This was well timed for me. Appreciate the list; its comprehensive and overflowing with good stuff. Very grateful to have this as a reference piece. Grateful.
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Great to be part of intellectual people like yous
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Building a relationship with your readers and with the writers you read is important!
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Your noteworthy tip supports my belief that, if folks make the time to comment, one should respond for sure.
As always, terrific thoughts shared with the rest of us. Thanks!
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Reblogged this on hallucinatingmartyr.
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You’re still motivating me to consider moving to hosting away from WP – because you still deliberately inhibit traffic to news-based, diarist sites like mine – or for that matter the Big Blog I edit. Which is why “the boss” didn’t use wp.com in the first place.
So far, I’m too lazy to change and still have threads of positive feeling about WP and Matt from the beginnings. And overlap from Om. But, I know I could turn my personal blog into higher traffic and income – looking back at the traffic I had before the 2 or 3 deliberate management decisions made to reduce that.
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Thanks for the comment.
How do you imagine we deliberately inhibit traffic? Sorry that you feel that way, but we’re really not that powerful. Even if we were, we benefit when blogs grow and gain larger audiences. We try to use what power we have to help all WordPress.com and WordPress blogs – it’s in our interest to do so.
We do a few things here like Freshly Pressed to bring attention to a changing sample of quality blogs, but that’s not the same as inhibiting anyone. Most traffic to WordPress.com blogs comes not from within, but from the vast majority of the public web. Which decisions are you referring to?
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Then I should comment here first to build traffic for my blog 🙂
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Thank you so much for your advise here. I am doing some of these things already, but you definitively gave me some fresh ideas. I am going to look into making some polls! Take care Scott!
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thanks for your post
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So should I start commenting here? 🙂
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Can’t hurt. But it’d be more effective if you comment on blogs like yours. So unless you make blogging software, there are better blogs to comment on than this one 🙂
See http://wordpress.com/#!/topics/ to find blogs on the same topics as yours to start some conversations with.
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I have a blog where I post excerpts of a story I am writing (I’m in the first draft). Every once in a while, instead of an excerpt, I’ll post a reflexion on the writing process itself, and that usually gets me more interaction with the visitors. Great article and you just made me realize what I need to do in the second draft of my project to get the conversation going!!!! Thanks!
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Very helpful list, thank you, Scott.
One question stuck in my mind regarding your suggestion Nr. 6: if you know/think/feel that the most effective and enticing phrasing of the text on the ‘Leave a Reply’ button would be something like ‘What do you think?’, then why don’t you (get the WP developers to) change the default to the more effective text?
Obviously I am assuming you have awesome powers here, but it might at least be something to suggest?
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The plan was to change the default when we made it customizable, but we got distracted by other things.
We may do some testing to see which phrases, if any, increase the rate of comments, and if we discover anything of value, we’ll change the default.
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Good post. I tweeted this! Thanks for sharing…
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Great post! I’ve been trying all the above advice and, little by little, it seems to work! I’m real happy!
Thanks again for posting!
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Two points: 1) In a word, “TYPOGRAPHY.” Some WordPress themes, for instance “Chunk,” give the comments link high visibility. But some, like my favorite, “Twenty Ten,” make the comments link nearly invisible. Bigger and bolder type for the comments link in some themes would be a big help.
2) I wonder if demographics of the WordPress community have changed. When I started blogging on WordPress in 2007, “Freshly Pressed” featured well-written essays on a variety of subjects. Nowadays, “Freshly Pressed” seems to focus mostly on photos, fashion, food, and travel. I suppose those are all popular areas. But I wonder if the blogosphere is being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
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Reblogged this on Carpet Bomberz Inc. and commented:
Always good suggestions on the WordPress News blog. I like that they try to build the community.
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That is interesting, I am glad of every visit or comment I get. The real joy for me is clicking on the person in the comment section having a look at their blog and clicking through a comment on that blog and following alice down the rabbit hole…… It is a very interesting world and this crazy wordpress community lets me see a lot of it from my desk.
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Thank you very much for writing this blog. It was very easy to understand. I’m insanely new to the whole new spacetech stuff out there. I’m trying to figure out how to manage this website and these seem to be great pointers for a newbie like myself. Everyone is a writer at heart and it is incredible that technology these days allows us all to connect in this way.
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Reblogged this on Share At Ease and commented:
That was a very good article.
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Excellent! I’m going to try to give a respons in english, even if I’m very bad with this exercice! If I’ve good understood, I MUST lieve a comment here and then I probably have more traffic… Your explications are very interesting and I’m going to apply them better than I do. I just have a problem: the button “publier” is closed to the button “enregistrer brouillon”; then, when I prepare a post, it arrives that I unfortunatelly publish a post which is not finished… Thank you for this coaching!
Laure de A TOUS LES ETAGES (France)
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I started a blog and write October 24, 2011, until this evening on 12 April 2012 statistics show 7564 blog visits. Of course I am very happy to even more traffic to my blog. Your advice was brilliant and I will try to follow. How do you think? Great and thanks !
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hi guys my site is about club
penguin so whats ur favourite
room? my site is stariso.wordpress.com
im only a beginer so please
dont talk too scientific.
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Great advice and some simple things to do to get more traffic to your site… love it! Trying to build my traffic up and following the advice
Armand Rosamilia
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All of these ideas sound great, but a broke college student trying to bribe people into reading my blog? I don’t think I could do it at this point in my life.
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Thanx for this article. I am new at this and I am grateful to you for taking the time to be so helpful. I have a lot to learn and I need all the help I can get 🙂
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it sounds alright just not natural enough. too much purpose.
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I don’t know if this is the proper approach or not but I can’t get back on my own blog. It has been a long time since I used it. Can anyone out there help me? Your article on getting more comments has inspired me to get going again. My problem was not knowing how to get people to visit my site. Now I think I understand. Thank you, Gary
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Thanks for all the great tips Steve. I definitely need to focus on building traffic to my site first with regular posts as a strategy to do this. Thanks again. Please check out my blog when you have a chance http://www.smboost.com
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I really appreciate my regular commenters and try to comment on their blogs periodically as well. Comments make the difference between one’s post being a diatribe versus a dialogue. For awhile I read a blogger who’s writing I really admired and with whom I identified, but the blogger did not allow comments. After a while, he changed to allow comments, but never responded to them. I stopped following that blog. Perhaps others have had similiar experiences as well. Thanks for your information Scott.
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Thanks great tips 🙂
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Reblogged this on socialmediaboost and commented:
Here are some great tips to use if you are serious about building comments through increased traffic to your blog. Enjoy 🙂 D
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The biggest mistake made is leaving self promoting comments or spam and not addressing the posts. Most comments made are self promotional and get no attention which is a big waste of everyone’s time. I spend more time deleting spam comments than anything. They are generic copied garbage that are not relevant to the article and no one sees them. If the same amount of time was spent in genuine commenting instead of grabbing RSS feeds the end result would be much more rewarding.
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This is a great post. Glad to see that I follow atleast a few points that you’ve mentioned in this post.
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really great advice
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¿No es posible recibir los comentrarios y span en espeñol???
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I get a lot of comments and I think the trick I found was asking one or two questions at the bottom of each post.
The more relatable the post, the more comments I get.
I also comment on a lot of blogs per day, so they come to my blog.
Great post!
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Has anyone done any research on what the typical comment rate is, for example, say, one comment for every 10, 50, 100 or however many readers? That might be something neat to add to our stats. Maybe call it “Comment-to-reader ratio” or something similar. It should be easy enough to calculate from exisating data, on an individual post, overall average, and for a given time span.
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We don’t have data on comment to readers. I suspect it would vary from blog to blog, as some content lends itself to comments and discussions more than others.
We do know the majority of posts are commentless. Of all posts, roughly:
77% have zero comments
20% have 1-5 comments
2% have 6-10 comments
1% have 10+ comments
This supports how powerful comments are to bloggers. They’re not as common as people assume. Writing and receiving them is significant.
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The first thing you could do to help us is get rid of the collapsible comment box.
It has distressed some of my regular commenters, and I certainly don’t like it. We are careful about grammar, spelling and such, and many of the comments are as substantive as some posts. Trying to edit comments has become frustrating and time-consuming, as any attempt to go back collapses the box.
I’ve found the work-around, but it seems such a basic part of blogging shouldn’t need a work-around.
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Reblogged this on freeliteraturestuff.
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So many good ideas! Thank you!!
What happens if you think something under SPAM isn’t really spam? How do you really know?
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Great advice. I see some thinge I definitely can use when writing my blog posts.
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Very good advice–I’ve used a few of these methods and found them to be very effective. I am anxious to try the other ways mentioned.
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Useful tips, thank you. I often put calls for action at the end ofmost of my posts. Didn’t know I could alter the leave reply text, ill deffinatley look into it. I enjoy the discussions you can get through comments and I love having the chance to check out other users blogs with related interests.
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nobody visits my blog 😦
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How about how to get less spam first. More comments are easy, if you don’t mind about spam. But I detest spam and anything that looks like it. I made the mistake early on replying to someone and leaving their website and email visible and have only had spam since.
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Thanks for a great post. I always link my posts to FB so even though I’m getting a lot of views people are only commenting on facebook and not on my blog. Got any ideas?
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I feel almost obligated to leave a comment after that post, great stuff
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But why do people want comments? Would you want to publish a book that includes everything anybody ever scribbles in the margins?… 😉
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Gratitude; the learning mode never stops!
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Thanks for the information to the people that have blogs. I myself have been
bloging for a year now and find it to be interesting and fun for those who are
starting out don’t give up. I browse web for information that would help those
in the topics there looking for There have been blogs that I’d visit that had very
little on them but still had good ideas. I have been following you’re blog
and you have been putting out good information. I do believe that
communicating with others is the best teacher. For now I will have to
say keep up the good work “Thanks For All”
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Thank you for this, very useful info. Now all I need is to get over this writer’s block…and then I can implement your suggestions.
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Thanks, that’s really useful. Sometimes you feel like you’re posting into the ether – would be good to know what people think
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Its funny Scott, I just started my blog 12 days ago and I was just thinking of this topic that you just wrote about. I’ve been having a difficult time getting people to comment. I will use this advice and put it to work. I just appreciate that there are people out there that are willing to share their success and help others out. Thanks and I greatly appreciate you’re help. I also live very much the how to get traffic article you linked to. Thanks for looking out for the newbies!! =-)
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Thanks for statistics (reply to Mike). So, we may rejoice for the first comment which is in the 20%! I’ve observered that when there is one comment, a second often follows. May we write ourselves the first comment on our own posts?!
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Brilliant. Thanks for this post – huge help. Am off now to customise my comment thingy and pop some quick polls up. Can you keep the top advice coming?
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The info here in the comments about the average # of comments per post makes me feel better…Phew! Thank you!
And thanks for the great ideas in your post!
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Why am I not seeing a like or favorite button for this post?
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Nevermind. Found it. It’s been a LONG week for me.
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Reblogged this on GothamGreen212 and commented:
Great tips.
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I would like to thank you for all your interesting posts, they are a guidlines for me and my small Italian blog.
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Great advice. Now to implement it. Why is it hearing advice is always easier than following it?
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Thank you so much for your advise here. I am doing some of these things already.
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I am interested in turning my blogs iinto a book..can you help>? I did get an email from you re this but cannot now find it.
Thanks Kate
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Great advice…Works for me. parmsweb
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People are having trouble leaving comments on my blog since WordPress instituted the new comment policy requiring that people be logged in to WordPress. People are very confused and can’t understand why they are having trouble commenting. They don’t even remember that they may have had a WordPress.com blog or gravatar at one point. So they leave confused and disappointed. Fortunately, it doesn’t effect everyone, but it does effect quite a few. I would love if you would write an official blog post about this and help us find a more effective way to help people comment who are having trouble. Thanks!
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Interesting post on comments, and some very good advice, thank you! The comments that have followed on from it are interesting and make some valid points which I also think are very helpful. Although it’s always a great feeling when I hit the publish button and a new post wings it’s way out into the world, it’s when someone takes the time and trouble to leave a comment on it, that I feel that my post has truly become come to life.
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Reblogged this on businessseoblog.
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This post is quite helpful.
Thank you for sharing your wisdom. I love learning 🙂
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thanks for your information.God blles you
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Thanks for the suggestions!
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Great advices. Maybe I should try some. Keep’em coming!
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Reblogged this on I am BabyBird, I *AM* Poet4LIFE…And THIS is Mariposas TRUTHS!!.
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Thanks for this article. Please check out my blog when you have a chance blog.discountsguide.com
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Les recomiendo este libro estápadrisimo para las chicas que estan en espera de ese hombre que Dios diseñó para cada una. Aqui les dejo el link http://www.facebook.com/TuPrincipeQuien y la reseña. Bendiciones!
Si durante la espera de ese príncipe azul te has preguntado: ¿Quién será? ¿Cómo saber si es el príncipe correcto? o ¿Cuándo llegará? Entonces este libro contestará todas tus preguntas. Tú tienes un destino glorioso que vivirás con el príncipe que Dios ha diseñado única y especialmente para tí, en su tiempo. Solo es cuestión de esperar, tener una relación con Dios y de lo demás Él se encargará y verás que ¡Valdrá la pena esperar!
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very goog advice 🙂 http://pervizhesenov.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/17-mart-%c9%99dal%c9%99t-namin%c9%99/
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Though I agree with most of these tips, the one about polls I disagree with. Polls are an impersonal, insubstantial gimmick. Nothing produces high-quality, thoughtful comments like being real and open with all those who contribute their reactions to your writing. When you prove how much you value the author-reader relationship you have with commenters, they give their best to your site, and it expands the quality of what you publish.
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I think you should do a poll on your blog asking your readers if they think polls are gimmicks or not 🙂
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useful check list!
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guys… i got some problem with my menu bar.. i just editting something on the menu.. and now all of it look like a mess.. can anyone help me..?
mohdshafiq_cheras@yahoo.com
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by the way this is my blog.. shineacademy.my
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Thanks for the tips! We just started our blog so we really appreciate all the advice here.
We look forward to sharing more interesting stories and good content with everyone in the community.
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Sometimes, It’s simply impossible to find the comment link on blogs. They are hiding there somewhere, but I can’t locate them and so I move on. Others have a nice easy to find comment bubble for my less than average eyes to find.
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Go throug my site to get some perfect ideas http://millionsonweb.wordpress.com/
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These tips remind me about the larger context of what it means to be sociable. Hmmmm …. maybe that’s the subject of my next post.
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Thank you, useful. First thing I must is reading other blogs and coment.
Never except to be read if you don’t read, that’s my blog motto.
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Nice bit of advice! I try to comment on any article I find interesting because I know all to well the sting of a post that has zero posts, actually I have a lot of posts with no comments lol. Then again I’m thinking a spam-bot is worse than no comment at all.
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Thanx for the information, I am new to it so I needed it.
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I don’t think comments should be a blogger’s concern.
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So useful advice, as always! 🙂
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Great tips here. Infact i actually replied to a comment on my blog http://blog.iitjeeprep.co.in after reading the tips here.
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Reblogged this on kabagambejackson.
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hola
lamento no poder escribir en ingles.
esta muy bueno y bien explicado ,gracias por todo
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hola
lamento no poder escribir en ingles.
esta muy bueno y bien explicado ,gracias por todo
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Terrific advice. Thank you. Have a great day. 🙂
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Reblogged this on naturallyplatinum.
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Your article on how to get more blog comments is excellent. I’m really going to take it to heart. Lately, I have been writing
on Biblical History, with some of the chapters of my book “Patriot Call of Ron Paul” thrown in if they relate. I wrote today about
a Biblical prophet Jacob, of the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lineage. Jacob was told by God to become Israel and he did, becoming the pivotal character in the history of the Jews and the country Israel. He had twelve sons. Try that for a prolific family. But that turned into literally millions and millions of people carrying his blood line including myself and maybe you. I’m a Mormon and we know our family history. Check out my article on
http://ChurchWire.blogspot.com and leave a comment.
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