The coolest thing about blogging is the social interaction and community that is built when readers leave meaningful comments. But building an engaging community isn’t that easy. It requires lot of hard work and dedication to get those loyal readers who join your community. And participate in your blogs discussion. But thanks to millions of programmer and coders who have made building a community on blog lot easier and convenient, with their great tools and plugins.

Today we are going to discus such plugins and tools that can help you increase comments and create the scenes of community on your blog.

Offer Incentive To Your Commentors:
Incentives work in the blogosphere . Commentors will respond to incentives. Incentives such as dofollow back links and top commentors have worked for many bloggers, it motivate your readers to join the discussion and add their thoughts and feedbacks,

Here are 4 such Incentive plugins:

Lucia’s Linky Love:
Lucia’s Linky Love is a great variation of *Dofollow* plugins, though its main function is to remove *nofollow* tag from author link in comments, it is more then just a Dofollow plugin.

It Gives You Full Control Over Dofollow/Nofollow:
Dofollow blogs happened to be softest target for link spammers and black hate SEO practitioners. But now you can create obstacles for such spammers by increasing number of comments required by commentor before enabling the dofollow option, which means your commentor will need to visit and comment on your blog regularly to get the benefits of dofolow. Which discourage spammers who considers your blog a link farm.

14 days time limit:
Dofollows will not be added to comments left more than 14 days after you published your most recent post. which means if a reader want dofollow link juice he will need to keep update with your blog and comment regularly. This feature can help you get some quick RSS subscribers too.

You can download Lucia’s Linky Love from Big Bucks Blogger. And donforget to read the user feed backs on this great plugin.

CommentLuv:
This gives your commentors additional incentive using CommentLuv, which searches their RSS feed and adds a link to their last blog post in their comment. This gives your commentor a keyword reach anchore link to their blog, its like icing on cake.

Download Commentluv from FiddyP.

KeywordLuv:
You must have seen comments with fancy keywords instead of real name of the commentor. This is because they are trying to get keyword rich links back to their blogs. Keywordluv makes things easier for your commentor. Just add your name as YourName@Your Keywords and Your Keywords will be used as the anchor link and your name will be shown separately. If I enter Sunil@Blogger’s Lab in comment form instead of Sunil Blogger’s Lab, then the title of a comment would look like

Sunil From Blogger’s Lab

Instead of

Sunil Blogger’s Lab

Neat isn’t it?

Download KeywordLuv from More Than Scratch The Surface

Top Commentor Widget:
Thanks to lists like Yan’s *Blogs with Google Pagerank and Top Commentor widget*. Top Commentor has become huge hit among blog reader who wants to get some link juice. This cute little widget adds a list of top commentators to your sidebar. Which is Dofollow (you can make it Nofollow if you want) and it appears on every page of your blog (you can restrict it to your home page if you want)

Get Top Commentors widget plugin from Webgrrrl.net

Note: if your blog is brand new then wait until your posts generate decent number of comment, before you feature Top Commnetors Widget on your sidebar.

Those are 4 great plugins I have been using since long time, and I am pretty satisfied with the out come of those plugins.

Now lets check some more plugins which wont hurt your community if you don’t install them. But it can do wonder if your install them.

Subscribe to Comments:
It adds a “Notify me of followup comments via email” check box below the submit comment button. This is a great feature as users can keep track of comments, when a new comment is made to the post, an email is sent to the subscriber notifying them. This is much better then having your blog reader subscribes to your comment RSS.

Get Subscribe to Comments 2.1 from Tempus Fugit

Brian’s Threaded Comments:
This plugin adds a ‘Reply to this comment’ link to every comment. When you use the reply link, your comment is placed directly under the comment you replied to. This plugin helps increase comments, makes it easy for people to reply to comments and prevents readers from scrolling down to look for answers to their questions.

Download Brian’s Threaded Comments from Meidell.dk

Make Your Comment Area Alive With 4Avatar:
4Avatars is a simple Plugin for WordPress that allows you to add avatars to comments on your blog. Avatars are from MyBlogLog or Gravatar (globally recognised avatars) or even from Polish site Avatars. Of curse avatars are NOT saved on your ftp!

4Avatars have very simple options page which allows you to choose site with avatars and choose default avatar which will be shown when author of comment doesn’t have any.

Download 4Avatars Plugin from Wordpress.org

Let Your Reader Share Their Favorite Post From Your Blog with Share This:
The ShareThis WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple to use, and unobtrusive way for users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and more.

Get Share This Plugin From Sharethis.com

So friends those are the 8 plugins I use on my blog to encourage comments and participation on my blog. If you have more suggestions for great community building WordPress plugins? Please share your Favorites in the comments.

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