6 Plugins that Put Your Comment Boards to Work for You
Some bloggers take a hands-off attitude toward comments. They figure they’ve got better things to do than worry about select opinions that may not even provide any helpful insight. Anyone who’s ever spent some time reading YouTube comments can relate: Comments aren’t always Grade-A discourse.
However, ignoring your comment boards is not only a mistake that will allow them to be overrun by trolls and spammers, but a huge missed opportunity to increase your readership. As any good social media expert will tell you, building a fan base is about creating a conversation between your readers and you.
Comment boards also have the potential to create a healthy amount of buzz and traffic for your site, and you don’t have to spend hours to capitalize on that potential. Here are six plugins that put your comment boards to work for you.
1. SEO Super Comments
Expand your visibility to search engines by automatically generating a new page for each comment. SEO Super Comments grabs the content, adds an H1 tag, and makes a new dynamic page on your blog. Since blog comments are searched, indexed, and ranked by search engines, the extra formatting added by this plugin optimizes the way the comments appear to them.
2. Subscribe to Comments Reloaded
Improving on an earlier version of the plugin, this iteration lets commenters sign up to receive a notification whenever another comment is added to the same thread. It keeps readers happy with a subscription manager that facilitates easy unsubscribing from some or all comments. It also features a double opt-in option you can activate to require users to confirm their subscription before they’re officially signed up.
3. WP Comments Boss
Comment spam is a particularly annoying and time-consuming brand of online nuisance. WP Comments Boss lets you tag spammers, filter them out, and prevent them from benefiting from your site while cluttering it up with useless advertising. It even features a “Screw With The Spammers’ Heads” option that fools spammers into thinking you’ve accepted their comments, so as to waste their time as payback for the time of others that they waste every day.
4. Comment Relish
A well-known marketing mantra is that you can almost never thank a customer enough; a sincere “Thank You” goes a long way. This plugin reflects that mantra. Whenever a reader leaves a comment, it automatically sends a message of thanks.
5. Newsletter Signup
This plugin helps you grow your newsletter subscriber list by adding any of several optional opportunities for readers to sign up for your newsletter: a checkbox within an individual comment or registration form, a signup form widget, and/or a shortcode for newsletter singup that you can embed into your posts and pages.
6. TheThe Captcha
Why yes, since you asked, we do have a great plugin for comments too. Our CAPTCHA plugin creates simple tests that humans can pass, but machines can’t, making it impossible for soulless spambots to trawl the internet, find your blog, and leave their junk on your comment boards.
Dr Patrick McNally PhD
Love these tips! I am going to install some today hopefully. One question – how do you feel about adding all these plugins? I don’t want to bog my site down w/ too many. Also – wondering what you think about putting a floating subscribe bar in wordpress.
Thank you for your comment. You won’t need WP Comments Boss if a CAPTCHA plugin is installed from the start of your blog. You just won’t have SPAM comments to filter by that WPCB plugin. The rest of plugins can be installed together. We are thinking about combining all the ideas of these plugins and some other ones into a single Comments Master plugin.
Sweet! I LOVE plugin posts. I have used Comment Relish in the past, as well as Subscribe to Comments Reloaded. A few questions/thoughts…
Does Newsletter Signup let you add them to a third party mailing list, like, say Mailchimp, Aweber or Constant Contact? That would be divine!
Comment Relish…is it just for the 1st comment a user submits or all of them? Seems like that would be nice a time or two, but if you were a regular commenter, it may get pretty spammy/impersonal. Ya know?
With the SEO Super Comments, I should just try it out so I get a feel for it, but how do users experience it? Is it easy for them to click on a single comment & get frustrated that they were taken away from the post & other comments? It’d be nice thought if say they wanted to link to their individual comment.
Lastly, how come I don’t see the Newsletter plugin at the bottom of this post? Is there a reason NOT to use it?
Thanks for the post Adam!
Guess I just needed to read a bit to see that the Newsletter Signup works with Mailchimp. I’ll try ‘er out with a client and see how she goes. Danke schoen!