Getting people to post comments on your blogs?

Anyone have any useful ideas to encourage people to post comments on blogs or your forums?

I'll share some advice based on my experience:

A few years ago I launched a blog as a means to create a community type of website. All of the content on the site was created by me, but I wanted lots of comments and social interaction on the site. The goal was to see how quickly I could make the blog reasonably popular.

Here are the things that worked the best for me:

1) I ended blog posts by asking for the reader's opinion/experience about that topic.
2) I visited lots and lots and lots of other blogs that had lots of comments on them and started leaving thoughtful, intelligent comments on them.
3) I responded to every single comment on every post and I did it as soon as possible after the person left the comment.

I developed a really active audience for that website by doing those things. A lot of the reason people spend time online is because it is their social outlet. People knew that if they visited my site and left a comment on there, someone would respond to that comment pretty quickly. People like getting responded to quickly. It makes it more like a real conversation as opposed to an email chat. Whenever I published a new blog post, within the first 24 hours of being live, the post would get at least a dozen new comments. I would respond to each one of them ASAP. And there would be a lively discussion about whatever topic it was.

**Note - If you are going to try the same approach, look for other blogs that have lots of comments on them. The people who comment on those blogs are the people you can get to come to your blog and chat with you. It helps if the topics are similar between your blog and those other blogs. When you find one of those blogs, bookmark it. Then come back to that blog every single day and check to see if there is a new post. Or else subscribe to their feed so you are notified of new posts. Try to leave a comment right away after a new post is published. That helps your comment get seen by the maximum number of people. You can double or triple the speed of your results by being early.

There is a certain type of visitor who will actually leave a comment and participate in the discussion. A lot of visitors won't for one reason or another. So if you want comments, you should go after those specific types of people who like to chat publicly online like that.

Think PTTed said it best. It's a strategy that I use and if you put in the effort, leave good comments on other blogs, you'll get comments back. The law of reciprocity in action

There is also another important side benefit, you'll also see your social shares increase. Helps if you share the blog your commenting on, and make sure the blog owner knows you shared it by tagging them, then they will be much more likely to share your blog posts. After a while you'll have a group that shares your new stuff, almost every time.

I use to have a firefox plugin that I could add RSS feeds, so if I stayed on top of it, I could be one of the first to comment, as PTTed mentioned. The plugin stopped working, and I have yet to look for a replacement. Just made it easy to keep everything in one place and have pretty much instant notification.

But be prepared, it can really take some time.