In my previous post, Small Business Blogging Part 1 – Finding Your Niche, we talked about how to choose who to write for and types of posts you could write. Now I’m going to share a few ideas to encourage your blog readers to interact with your blog and interact with comments.

To start, I have to say that my blog did not receive any comments for a very long time. Then, I started to do things a little differently. Here are the three steps I took to encourage more blog comments.

1. I put my personality into my blog posts. I was an English major in college with a concentration on business writing. I found that my early blog posts read like boring essay assignments. Once I started writing like myself, I not only found the writing would come easier, but also  more readers would reply with comments.
2. I write on topics my readers want to read. How do I know what my readers want to read. Wel, I look at which posts get the most page views in Google Analytics and write more posts on those topics. For example, the posts that get the most reads for me are those written about ranking in Google, blogging, and Twitter. Look at your stats and see which posts get the most reads for you and write more posts on those topics.
3. I ask for comments. Yes, that’s right, I just ask. From time to time you may see a simple statement at the end of a post that says “tell me what you think” … give it a try and see what happens.

So there you have it. Three very simple steps to encourage your readers to comment on your blog posts. Give one a try and tell me how it works for you.