Incentives work. Our whole economy is powered by incentives — as one of my favorite business books Freakonomics reveals.

Incentives work in the blogosphere too. Commentors will respond to incentives. Motivate your readers to comment with the following WordPress plugins (hat tip to Blogtalks.net):

• Show Top Commentators — to publicly recognize and name your top commentors on your blog
• Link Love — to motivate your commentors to post comments, because they’ll get links and PageRank from you. Most blog platforms automatically nofollow the links in comments, so that no PageRank is transferred. This WordPress plugin removes the nofollow, so that your commentors will gain an SEO benefit from their comments. Just make sure that your blog is pristinely clean of comment spam. You don’t want to inadvertently link to what Google calls “bad neighborhoods.”
• Comment Relish — to send Thank You notes to your new commentors. The plugin ensures that you don’t send regular commentors repeated thank you emails. So don’t worry, you want be inadvertently barraging your commentors with an onslaught of spam.

In case you’ve missed it, Jim Turner and I have been doing a little radio show over at Blog Talk Radio. We took a week off so I could go camping and caving, but we’re back this week!

Jim and I have been doing a lot of thinking about blogging vs writing. What makes blogging something more than content? We’ve been coaching our bloggers at Bloggers For Hire on this and educating our clients as well. I don’t think we’ve even begun to scratch the surface on the whole topic. So tomorrow we’re going to tackle that one on the next show which will be tomorrow (Wednesday the 20th) at noon PDT. Remember you can call in at (646) 478-5023 or Skype us or … Gtalk…MSN …

We’d love to have callers chime in with their opinions and if I can get a chat room set up in time … we’ll have that too! Check our Twitter feeds for updates tomorrow (Jim’s tweets— Tris’ tweets)

Catch you tomorrow!

You can listen to our past episodes in the archives section

Update: I got the web chat working! Launch the Userplane Webchat.  Jim and I will be hanging out there before, during, and maybe a little after, they show.

Technorati Tags: MediaSphere Radio, Jim Turner, Tris Hussey, pro blogging, professional blogging One By One Media, Bloggers For Hire