This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.
Reza asks:
When I launched the first post on my blog, there was no one visiting it and, so it was difficult to get comments. Now if people visit my blog and don’t see any comments, they will think it sucks. How do I solve this problem?
This looks like a chicken-egg conundrum huh? When you have a new blog, you won’t get comments because you don’t have visitors. But you will also not get visitors because you have no comments (and thus no social proof).
Luckily for new bloggers this is not a real conundrum, it just looks like one. New visitors will certainly take a look at the number of comments on your blog to gauge its credibility, but this is just one of the factors they will take into consideration.
It is not like visitors will run away as soon as they see “0 Comments” on all your posts. Well, some might, but definitely not the majority.
This means that the average visitor will give you the benefit of the doubt, and he will probably at least check your headlines and click to read one post.
If you have outstanding content, therefore, you should be able to start attracting new readers even with a very low number of comments on the blog, and over time some of these new readers will start commenting, building your social proof.
That being said, it would be easier to attract readers if you could display some social proof from day one. It is hard, but possible. Here are three tactics that you can use for this purpose:
1. Friend and Family. If you want to get some comments on your very first posts, you will inevitably need to tap into your offline network, and usually this will translate into friends and family. Just ask them to visit the blog and to leave a meaningful comment on one of your posts.
2. Blogging Partners. There are probably thousands of bloggers out there who are exactly in your same situation. They are starting a blog and don’t have readers yet to leave comments. Why not approach them and propose a partnership, where you take the time to read and comment on their posts and vice-versa? Apart form building your social proof, this will also foster your online network.
3. Killer Articles. If you write a killer article (i.e. an article that is long, structured and that packs a huge amount of value for potential readers) and promote it on social media, you will certainly get some comments, if not dozens of them. This will give you a boost in credibility, and there is always the chance that some of those social media visitors will become loyal readers and start commenting on your other posts too.
What about you, did the low number of comments bothered you when you started blogging? What tactics did you use to solve the problem?
About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
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