J David Macor

One of the hardest parts of being a blogger is attracting readers. Hits may come and go, but if you build a solid foundation of readers (via feeds, which gives you an easy tracking method), you will always have an engaging and attentive audience. Now that you have identified the problem, there are several ways you can attack it. There is the obvious badge solution, whereby you promote your own rss feed. This is an excellent idea, but you need people to click that badge. So, I think that you need to personally engage your readers, i.e. respond to comments; participate in the conversation. Now, sometimes there isn’t anything you can say in response to what someone else says. This is where the plugin (finally I am talking about the damn thing…) comes into play. It will send an email to a first time commenter that you can predefine. I would suggest something along the lines of a thank you note, and even recommend your feed.

This plugin was developed by Justin Shattuck and I think it is a great one. Here is what he has to say about it:

Comment relish is a Wordpress plugin developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your website who have never commented before. The message dispatched to the user is defined within the plugin’s preferences. Numerous tags have been integrated to allow for information to be included in the message easily (I.E.: timestamp, author name, comment, ETC.).

So, go find out more details about it and download this great plugin! The download page includes instructions on how to install it, and the use of the plugin is pretty self-explanatory. Everything is controlled within the plugin’s settings, so try it out!