If you’re blogging to promote your business, at some point questions about blog comments are going to come up including:

Can chasing blog comments leave you broke?

How do you get more of those darned blog comments?

And now I’ve called on 5 well-respected business owners who use their blog to market their services. I asked them the same 3 questions:

1. When did you start seeing an increase in comments on your blog?
2. What work did you have to do to get there?
3. How do comments help your business model?

Here we go:

James Chartrand: Men With Pens

Comments are down… sales are up.

When did you start seeing an increase in comments on your blog?

You know, I honestly can’t remember.  It was incredibly long ago (in internet years of course), but my guess would be about 3 months or less. Back then, there was a lot less competition than there is today.

What work did you have to do to get there?

 I blogged about 3 times a week, I think. Maybe a little more. And I wrote articles that I felt were useful and helpful to other people… definitely not the current storytelling trend or personalized style there is today.

How do comments help your business model?

Mmmmmm… in all honesty, they don’t. The problem with Men with Pens is that it has a split market – the people who actually hire me who are never readers, and the people who read the blog but who never buy. I suppose comments make the blog seem popular and alive and thriving which helps my credibility of course, but at the end of the day, they don’t earn me dollars.

What’s interesting is that commenting on my blog is down – really down. An article may not get more than a handful of comments. And yet, sales are up. Go figure. (SIGH.)

I do know that people tend to share the articles on social media more than they used to, and that people who do so tend to talk about the articles on social media versus commenting on the blog. I also know that most of my peers have experienced the downtrend in commenting as well. Except for Derek Halpern. His blog is crazy.

Pamela Wilson – The Big Brand System

Comments build community and can build from your email list

When did you start seeing an increase in comments on your blog?

I saw an increase when I started deliberately ending my posts with questions. I must say, I end many posts asking for readers to sign up for something, and those posts don’t get many comments. But straight posts on a provocative topic where I end with a question? Those definitely do.Occasionally I “turn the mic toward the audience” and ask them to weigh in on a topic, or share something about themselves. Those get a ton of comments. They’re amazing!

What work did you have to do to get there?

I have an email list that’s growing every day. They receive my blog posts when they’re published, so as that list has grown, so have my comments.

Along the same vein, as my social media followers have grown, my comments seemed to increase, too. Your posts get more exposure and more visits overall, so there’s an uptick in comments, too.

How to blog comments help your business model?

Any time there’s a post with lots of comments, it builds community, which is very important to me. There’s nothing I like better than to see readers interacting with one another in the comments.

Blog comments are a great place to get to know your ideal customer, too. You can read their comments and get ideas for new posts, new products to solve their challenges, and new free offerings you can create to help them along.

Sarah Arrow – Sarkemedia

On one blog, comments were harming her business

When did you start seeing an increase in comments on your blog?

When I started blogging on For Bloggers, By Bloggers (18 months ago) my social marketing blog started to get more comments. Until recently I never mentioned that site in my bio. I think people were searching for me – I’m very opinionated and found it. Over at Birds on the Blog, comments have always been up and down, sometimes a flurry of comments, other times nothing.

What work did you have to do to get there?

I was blogging for 4 years before I started Birds on the Blog. I’d turned off comments on my transport blog as they were detrimental to our image and business. I had at that point around 25 different blogs, so it seems like I’d been around forever before people started to notice me :). Last year I moved from my personally named domain to a domain named after my company. I imported all the old content from the personal site and then started adding to it. Recently someone added me to their “best newcomers to blogging” list and I felt I was a fraud! The domain may only be 8 months old, but I’d been blogging for years :), I wasn’t a newcomer.

Comment Luv Premium – it helps a lot. I also install Comment Luv Premium on my sites. When someone leaves a comment they can leave a link to their latest post underneath it. Looking at my exit links, readers do click on these and check out the articles. Another reminder how important the headline to a post is! When a commenter leaves three comments, the links become do-follow links as a reward/ incentive for participating. I also showcase the last 30 day’s top commenters in the sidebar. I have one reader who hates slipping of the leaderboard for the most comments!

How do comments help your business model?

On our transport blog comments don’t help at all. In fact one guy rang us up to say why do we allow the other couriers to comment, did we have any idea how it looked to the outside world? In short we decided to remove the commenting facility. We get a huge amount of business through the blog and not having comments hasn’t impacted negatively on us. On the site we have contact forms, Facebook, Twitter and email addresses, we can be contacted easily. We even go old school and have our telephone number on the site, prominently displayed.

On my social marketing blog I actively encourage comments on reviews. It’s important to get an authentic review where I’ve used the product. When I’ve posted I’ll track down people who love the product and those that hate it. And then I beg them to comment. They usually do, they know I drive a lot of traffic to these pages so they get exposure to.

Tim Brownson – A Daring Adventure

Comments are all about the ego…

When did you start seeing an increase in comments on your blog?

About 2 years after I started blogging

What work did you have to do to get there?

Lots of guest posts, me commenting on other blogs and the usual malarkey that goes round that including social media etc

How do comments help your business model?

Not sure they do any more and I really think blog comments are overrated and a bit of an ego thing.

Michael Martine – Remarkablogger

Comments build social proof

When did you start seeing an increase in comments on your blog?

  Comments are in some part a numbers game. More traffic means more potential comments. A very small percentage of traffic will comment, generally. Even less now because instead of commenting, people will just click the Like or Retweet buttons and be on their merry way.

The biggest factor, however, is the quality of the relationship you have with your readers regardless of how many readers you have. If you are engaged with them as people outside of your blog, they will naturally engage you on your blog. That is something you do from day one, before you even have a blog (that doesn’t mean it’s too late to begin).

What work did you have to do to get there?

Put a lot of work into growing my email list and making sure the information I provided was useful and got them thinking.

How do comments help your business model?

The number and quality of comments is an indicator to others of your value (social proof). This increases the perception of the value of your business proposition.

So there you have it!

What do you think? Do you agree with their points? Have you experienced similar results using their techniques to encourage comments? Is it just about ego? Let me know in the comments below!