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Top Commentators Plug-In Experiment

Posted by Paul B | February 4, 2008 .

The Top Commentators plug-in for wordpress allows you to reward the people that comment the most on your blog with a dofollow link (by default WordPress make comment links nofollow). It’s one plug-in that appears to be on everybody’s recommended list so I thought it would be interesting to see what difference it really made. In order to test this I created 2 completely new WordPress blogs and set up a posting schedule so that they would both contain about the same amount of content. I then installed the top commentator plug-in on one and left the other one blank.

When it came to promoting the blogs I did nothing more than submit sitemaps to Google’s Webmaster Portal and installing the entrecard widget. After 5 weeks I’ve got a pretty good idea of how things have turned out and whilst it’s no real surprise it does reinforce how important this plug-in can be. On the blog without the plug-in there were a grand total of 3 comments and an average of 8 unique visitors a day. On the blog with the widget there were a grand total of 17 comments and an average of 26 visitors a day. I’ve also got to say that both of them received very little in the way of natural search traffic, almost all was from entrecard. What I did notice which was a pleasant surprise was that the comment quality was faultless, I didn’t receive one “nice post” spam style comment.

How Can This Help Me Make More Money?
So much of blogging for money is about perception. If people perceive you to be successful then they are more inclined to listen to you and join in. Of course this has the circular affect of actually making you more successful. Part of that equation for blogs are the comments, a healthy active blog will have a healthy number of visitors willing to leave comments and the top commentator plug-in obviously helps to encourage people to leave a comment. By having what is perceived to be a popular blog things like direct advertising sales start to be a real option and that is where the big bucks can be made with blogging.

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3 Comments so far
  1. North Management UNITED STATES Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12  February 25, 2008 8:16 am

    Yes I just started to use Wordpress and this TC plug-in will work well. The more easier for my readers the better for me. Thanks, NM

  2. Karen PHILIPPINES Windows XP Flock 1.1  March 19, 2008 9:39 am

    Thanks for shring this, I’ll try using it. I think it’s fun.. Thanks again..

  3. Tom Lamothe ITALY Windows XP Internet Explorer 7.0  April 30, 2008 9:29 pm

    I think that was a pretty good post. I couldn’t do it :D . Keep up the good work.