I was reading a post over at ProBlogger in regards to the debate between disabling comments or not on low traffic blogs. Should sites with low traffic disable their comments? There are two main arguments for each side.

Enable

You don’t want to promote the fact that your blog has low traffic. People will see “0 comments” on a lot of posts and think just this. This negative affect could keep people from coming back or from posting comments at all. It’s a known fact that discussion will likely cause more discussion.

Disable

If you disable comments you are obviously losing the ability for users to interact with you and readers through the site, plus you are losing valuable content. The main goal is to turn somebody who is just reading a post on your site into a dedicated reader, and comments definitely help do that.

I believe that there are two options to choose from in terms of the best thing to do:

1) You can turn your comments off completely until you are at the point where you are generating 100-200 unique visitors/day. By the time you are consistently generating this amount of traffic, it should be enough that people will naturally make comments in key posts.

2) This option ties into option 1, as you should do this as well. Rather than your comments link saying something like “0 comments” or “No comments”, change it to “Post a comment” when there are no comments. This method doesn’t advertise the fact that nobody has commented on your post. Another option (the route I chose) is to choose something like “Be the first to comment” which does advertise that you have no comments, but also entices your readers to be the first to add their thoughts.

How Do I Change The Text?

This method works for Wordpress. Simply go to your theme editor, and edit your main index template. Depending on the theme that you are using, there may be some variations…so feel free to post comments with questions, and I can help you out. Search for the word comments, and you should be able to find the line of code that displays the output. I changed mine to this:

<?php comments_popup_link(‘Be the first to comment &#187;‘, ‘1 Comment &#187;’, ‘% Comments &#187;’); ?>

The first line there between the ‘?? ‘ is what Wordpress will output when there are 0 comments. Simply editing that text can make a powerful change on your blog.