Add Comment Notifications to your WordPress Blog with Style
Blogging is a new way of life. It’s everywhere you go. Most websites you visit are no longer “just a website”, but a full-fledged blog, with a website hidden in between.
One of the greatest reasons for using a blog is to gain instant report and feedback from your visitors. Did they like what your article had to say? Did they hate it? Did the have more information to add?
Blogs are a great way to receive that feedback, because they can enter a comment at the end of each article or post, and instantly tell you what they think.
As you can probably tell, I use WordPress as my blog of choice, and have been using WordPress for almost 3 years. I have no reason to use any other blog platform. I’m happy with what it does for me, and the ease with which I can add a plugin to do what it doesn’t do out of the box.
One of the things that WordPress doesn’t do out of the box is to allow comment notification of replies. And this is a problem if you want to create an open line of communication that is visible to the public.
Essentially, when a visitor leaves a comment, they have no reason to return when you, as the admin or author of the article, leaves a reply. That’s where a comment notifiaction plugin comes in real handy. If they choose to subscribe to the comments on your blog post, they’ll receive your comments via email, and be inclined to return and either leave another response, or check out more of your blog posts.
Here’s how I made comment notifications work on my site:
There are 3 plugins that I installed onto my blog that all work together to gain maximum traction.
Subscribe To Comments
Subscribe to comments is the base plugin that allows a commenter to elect to be notified of new comments on this blog post.
Download Subscribe to Comments
Installation is as easy as upload and activate. Adjust your settings to taste, with the minimum being to change the “from” email address and sender.
Comment Luv
Comment Luv is a plugin that will look at the website that was entered, and check if the website is a blog. If it is, it will list out the title of the last blog post that the author wrote, and provide other readers a direct link to the post.
Comment luv is great for encouraging bloggers to comment on your site, since they will get some extra link traction back to their site.
Installation is as easy as upload and activate. No need to make any settings modifications, but there are a few to play with, like the heart icon.
Ozh Absolute Comments
Absolute comments allows you to post comment replies directly in the WordPress dashboard interface. Otherwise you end up having to go directly to the post comments and making your comment responses on the blog page.
This is a convenience plugin that rocks. There are other things that this plugin does, but the big one is the ability to reply directly in the dashboard, and that the notifications you recieve will now have a direct link to “reply now” that takes you directly to the dashboard.
Download Ozh Absolute Comments
Installation is just like the other two plugins. Upload and activate. There is a settings page, but nothing that requires modification to get started.
So essentially, just download the 3 plugins from each of their sites, upload them to your server, and activate all 3 plugins. After that you’re in business. It took me about 10 minutes to get the whole thing configured, tested and considered finalized.
Go ahead and leave a comment below to test the new system. Leave your blog address in the website section to see how Comment Luv works, and check the “notify me of comments” and you’ll get a message when I leave a response.
Good luck, and let me know how it works out for you.
About the Author
Matt Kettlewell is an Internet marketer, Wordpress guru, blogging advocate, computer programmer, speaker, consultant, and a really fun guy! Visit his main blog at Kettlewell.net, his Wordpress expressions are at Blogging Emergency and his joint success pages with The Moxie Maven can be found at Mox & Dom.
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