How to encourage comments and community like Chris Brogan, learn from the pros.

Are you also trying to encourage more comments on your blog. The other day I was a master at work and I wanted to share it with you. The other day I made a comment on Chris Brogans blog and encouraged me to comment more. Here is how he did it.

Write the post in the right way

How to Reach Out to Bloggers

Chris started with a “how to” title, showing that this is a post about sharing knowledge, then he went straight into several questions leading you as a reader to engage your brain and asking you to think about what he was writing about.

Then he said “let’s talk about it” ,he is sharing his knowledge but he is not saying this is it, he is offering his views and asking you to convert, he when anwsers the questions he raised and builds up to questions at the end of the post. The post is well written and seperated into sections to make it easy to scan.

“An Imprecise Science

There’s more to it than all this, but this is a good start. If you’ve questions, I can definitely add more. What do you think? What have you tried that’s worked? What else have I missed?”

And by the time I read it, within hours of it going live, Chris had already added one readers thoughts to the post this encourages more people to add their though. This says if you make a good comment I will add you to my post.

“(Tyler in the comments suggested) Be clear what you want the outcome of the outreach to be.”

In the comments section

In the comments section Chris is very active at joining in the conversation and encouraging people to engage, his blog is setup to let him respond directly to individual comments and enter threaded conversation. Chris does not respond to ever comment but enough to make you know he is reading them.

Taking your comments beyond you blog

Not only did Chris respond to my comment on his blog he then also tweeted about my comment linking back to his blog.

“Smarter-than-me @murraynewlands has a good point about outreach – http://bit.ly/6g72gT (comment on my blog) 9:13 AM Jan 8th from Seesmic”

This encourages me to comment more and lets me know he is reading my comment, It also tells his follower he reads there comment. This also enables him to further tweet to promote his content and it draws his follower attention to commenting on his blog. Obviously I responded drawing my follower’s attention to his post and there followed more response on twitter. The other thing I like about this is that it is a example of using different media to draw community back to his communication hub, his blog.

More tips
What other ways have you seen Chris encourage comments? Who else is good at writing posts which generate lots of comments and build community and why?