Nora Brown Design

Foster conversation on your blog

Janine Adams pointed me (via a Twitter post) to a list of 40 Ways to Deliver Killer Blog Content.

One item in the list that caught my eye was #23: “Ask questions. Blogs are conversations starting and flowing. Ask. Questions.”

I always try to do this with my blog postings (not that it’s worked yet, really, but maybe because my audience is quite small). Besides posing questions within your blog post, in Textpattern you can customize your “comment invitation” for each post, eliciting readers’ opinions or asking for other input. A reader may be more likely to respond to a specific question than to a vague invitation. It’s not always appropriate though — sometimes you just want to leave it open for readers to react to anything in your post.

How to do it

A custom comment invitation

Over on the right side of the “Write” page, you will see a little box labeled “Comments”, where you can turn off comments, or change the comment invitation. You can see I have customized the invitation for this post.