Best Way to Get Interaction??

Hi

What's the best way to get interaction from visitors on your site?

I have tried a comments script with limited success.

Forums can be time consuming and you get plenty of spammers.

What I really want is a Questions and answer site like yahoo answers but I can't seem to find a good piece of software for this.

Has anyone got any more suggestions to get visitors engaged??

Thanks for any input!

 

I think commenting that you tried,is a good way but you get spam comments too much.
Also twitter can help you to be connected to your visitors.

 

Wish I knew. I've tried surveys, using Google Docs. No takers. I've put javascript doodads on it, like a Body Mass Index calculator (it's a weight loss site), YouTube videos, fresh articles every week. They come, they stay five minutes plus, and then they leave, without, according to Google Analytics, doing much of anything. I don't think people actually want to interact much when they're surfing. The best results I get is when they click through to a squeeze page for a freeby, which is getting a 58% CTR I'm quite happy with. If you ever find out what they want, let me know.

 

@Webgold, how new is your site?

I am also having the same problem with my blog. It does not have got as many visitors yet, since it is pretty new, but I try to update it frequently. I can see from Google Analytics that my visitors are actually reading my entries (when looking at the average time they spent on my site), but only a fraction of visitors bothers to leave comment.

I am starting to believe that the reason for this is, that I do not allow users to write a comment without entering their email address. This is a precaution I have to take, because otherwise my blog would be full of spam. My niche is software development, and most of my readers are coming directly to my blog (About 47 percent). Only ten percents is coming from Google (terrible result, I am working on it). The rest is coming from different blog categories of my niche. So the problem is not (in my understanding) that the readers find something that they did not expect to find. On the other hand, I have no idea what is wrong. I have been trying to write useful and interesting content, and get people to make comments to my entries, but it does not seem to work.

Sorry if this feel that I am trying to hijack the thread, but it makes more sense to me to keep the discussion concerning the same problem in one thread. This way we can all benefit from suggestions made to improve the current situation.

 

I don't feel that you are hijacking the thread at all, your problem is similar to mine, basically how to get people involved.

I have a couple of sites. I have found that if the subject/problem is very specific you will generally get people commenting. I also have found that the easier it is to add a comment the more comments you will also get.

I have starting using Disqus which has many options for people to add a comment (including Facebook connect) and have some success with it.

I guess you have to experiment and see what works best.

 

I think you have hit the nail on the head... if there is already a comment than people don't feel as inhibited to leave more comments. It's like a thread that had a lot of views but no comments -- as soon as 1 person breaks the ice the damn breaks. I'm not a coder but I know there's a bot that can do that for you

 

You have a good point there. I am just surprised that since I believe that most of my readers are working in the software development, they cannot figure out that my blog does not require them to leave the correct email address. It just requires that something is written in the email address field. Perhaps I should consider making email address optional, and just moderate all the incoming comments. Luckily WordPress has some plugins, which can be used to block spammers. Maybe I should try one of them.

I checked at their website, and it looked pretty interesting. Perhaps I will try it or try to find similar plugins, which makes it possible for me identify normal comments and spam without forcing people to enter their private information to my database.

 

Hi I think the best way is commenting the method which you are already doing.