Photo By suzanneandsimon

One big difference between a blog and a website is the way visitors can interact with the blog author. Bloggers allow all their visitors to leave a comment anytime. If they asked a question, simple say they enjoyed the article or when you don’t agree with the author’s opinion. That’s the power of the blog.

I have to admit, getting comments is one of the greatest things you can get when you are blogger. You get the confirmation your visitors are actually there and they aren’t just a number on your statistics software.

But allowing comments isn’t everything you can do to get user interactivity on your blog, many more options exist. In this article we will go through the solutions I think works best to improve user interactivity.

1. Contact Form

You should always try to make things as easy as possible for your readers on your blog. People are lazy and busy and if they can’t find something right way, they will simply leave.

The same thing with the contact form: if they can’t find that page in one click, they are usually gone. If you make it easy to find your contact information and web-form, you will receive more thank-, opinion- and comment-emails. That’s always great.

In some cases you could even add multiply contact forms to your blog to improve the number of emails you get.

My plugin recommendation is Cforms II: the best contact form plugin available for WordPress.

2. Polls

Adding a poll is a very good feature to add when you want to improve user interactivity. Many people read your article and move on, because they don’t have the time to add a opinion through the comments.

With a poll however the user only has to click once to leave an opinion and they will do that easier. You can also use the poll to gather valuable information about your visitors!

A good solution to add a poll to your WordPress blog is the WP-Polls plugin.

3. Shoutbox

If you have a free spot in your sidebar and you want your visitors to contact you even easier then hitting the “contact” button, consider using a shoutbox on your blog.

In a shoutbox a user can “shout” what they would like to tell you or the other visitors. Your visitor usually only has to add their name, email and their message, so when placed on a easy to find spot, it’ll really stimulate user interactivity.

You can find a live example of a shoutbox on Jeffro2pt0. To add a shoutbox to your WordPress blog, the following plugins AJAX Shoutbox and WP-Wall are recommended.

4. Community Forums

If you want to have a conversation or extensive discussion, the comments under your article aren’t the right place. That’s where your forum software comes in: you can separate the discussion from the other comments.

Forums were developed to let people talk to each other and therefore ideal for these kind of conversations. It can also become a place where visitors come to discuss and talk about niche-related news.

Remember: to make a forum successful on your blog you need to have a large visitors base.

This article will tell you exactly how to integrate forums with your WordPress blog.

5. Community News

Community news is a feature that is popping up at some more places lately: it allows visitors to promote their own articles in the sidebar of your blog.

If you don’t have the time to fill your readers’ hunger for more articles, let them provide interesting articles for their fellow readers by adding the news items to your sidebar.

Frank Verhoeven has just released the Community News plugin that
allows your visitors to add their news to the sidebar or page.

6. Voting

Usually, people have their opinion ready about an article, plugin, theme or website. Why not use this fact and let people rate that stuff with a voting system?

This way you make it very easy (same principle as with polls) for people to give their opinion about something, just with one simple click.

To add a voting system to your WordPress blog, you could use the GD Star Rating plugin.

Do you have other tricks?

There are loads more ideas and tricks in the world that could improve the user interactivity of your blog, so if you would like to share some that could help me or the readers, please do so in the comments!