If you want your blog readers and commentators to always come back for more engagement, you need to appreciate them. One of the ways to do it is publish a monthly report, listing everyone that came to your blog and dropped a comment. I did that in this post and the reaction from readers was amazing.
I have published many more reports using this plugin. Take a look at this post, this one and this one or click here for a list of more reports.
It’s quite not an easy task to dig through your blog, searching for those who commented in X month, counting the number of comments they made, then creating a list. What if your blog has hundreds of comments? That’s a hell of task – almost impossible, right?
Don’t worry! MyCommentAuthors will generate the list for you with just one click. All you have to do is select the month and the year. You’ll have a well ordered list of all those who commented and the number of comments they made. Next, create a blog post and publish the list.
Why do you need to do this?
People like to be mentioned. They like to be linked to. They like to be appreciated for the smallest effort they make. So if Johnson comes to your blog and drops 1 or more comments, why not say thank you by telling others hey Johnson was on my blog and made 5 comments?
If you do this, Johnson will feel recognized and will be back on your blog again and again. So this is going to help you to get more repeat visitors and increase engagement on your blog.
I created this plugin to help you in this task. It’s free so you don’t have to buy anything. This will help you with one sure post idea every month. You just have to generate the list and add some introductory text to it to form a complete blog post.
MyCommentAuthors is very light!
Some of us worry so much about blog speed and I can understand because I also do. I took this into consideration while developing this plugin. So I took steps to make sure it doesn’t add any weight on your blog’s loading speed;
- It only runs in admin.
- No Javascript involved.
- No CSS files.
- No extra database tables created.
- No shortcodes to display list.
The plugin will help in 4 steps;
- Query your database and create a list of comment authors and the number of comments made for the selected month.
- Generate an html script which you can just copy and paste in your post editor’s text mode.
- After you have published the post, grab the post url, come back to the list and send a friendly mail to the commentators. More about this below!
Installing the plugin!
There are 2 ways to install the plugin;
- Download it from WordPress.org plugin directory. Just upload the the zip file using your plugin installation wizard and activate.
- Go to your plugin installation page: Plugins -> Add New. In the search box, type mycommentauthors. You will find the plugin. Just click Install Now
Creating the list of comment Authors!
To generate the list of all commentators of a certain month, select the month, the year, and Get HTML. Click the Generate button. All you have to do now is just copy the generated html code and paste in the TEXT MODE of your post editor.
The Dofollow Limit: It’s up to you to decide whether to give a dofollow or nofollow link to your comment authors. The list generated will have links pointing to their comment URLs and with their names as anchor text. If you want to reward those that are more active in commenting, set a limit.
The default value is 20. That means everyone that has made 20 or more comments will have a dofollow link. If you want every one on the list to get a dofollow link, set the limit to any figure above the maximum number of commentators. If you want a nofollow link for everyone on the list, set it to 0
Option: There are just 2 options here
(1) Get HTML – This will generate the HTML version of the list so you can just copy and paste in your blog post.
(2) – Preview – Here, you will be presented a simple list of your commentators with your admin
Page Break: If you have a long list of commentators, you may want to break the list into different pages. This option allows you to indicate the number of commentators to show before breaking the page. For instance, if you have 50 commentators, you may want to break it into 5 pages of 10 on each page.
Template: There are 3 different designs as per the current version: Gravatar Table, Gravatar Box and Simple Text List. You should chose any of these depending on your theme and design.
Mailing your comment authors!
This feature should be used with a lot of caution. You should not use it to spam your commentators. The fact that they made a comment and dropped their emails along it does not permit you to send promotional mails. If you do that, you are spamming and you know what that means.
Before mailing your list!
You must make sure you do some basic settings. As shown in the image below, you have to set your mailing limit. Most shared severs don’t allow you to send out more than a certain number of mails from one domain within an hour. Hostgator for instance sets the limit to 500.
To make sure you don’t run into trouble with your host, I provided this limiting feature to allow you adjust it according to your host’s requirements. The default value is 450. Check with your host to know your exact limit.
Also make sure you set the From address and From name. The default address is the blog’s admin address and the default name is the name of your blog.
What if you have more authors than the set limit?
The script will never send more mails than the set limit. If you have 501 comment authors with a server mailing limit (Must be same limit set in MyCommentAuthors) of 450, the script will only mail to the first 450 starting with the author that has the highest number of comment to the one with the least. Authors listed from 451 upward will not get a copy of the mail. They however are present on the list to be published.
Note that everyone leaving a comment on your blog is important – whether once or twice or many more times.
When to mail your authors!
You won’t just get up one morning and decide to send a mail to your comment authors. The first thing I recommend is generate the list and publish the report post first. Then grab the url of the post and send to the list. This will trigger a mighty flow of traffic (depending on the number of authors though) to your blog.
After generating the list, click ‘Mail this List‘ button which is located just below the HTML generated script or the HTML Table. On the next page, if you are using this function for your first time, you will have to read the instructions. Then scroll to the form where you have to type the message to be sent. I have set a proposed message which you can modify though. However, I want you to note 3 important things;
- Don’t address the mail! Don’t use Hello or Hi. This will be done automatically in order to personalize the mail.
- Don’t remove or modify the shortcode [NumOfCom]. This will be dynamically replaced by the number of comment each author has made as the script loops through the list and sends the mail.
- Be sure to add the ulr of the report port in the mail.
NB: In the current version (1.7), I have hard-coded the subject of the mail. This is one of the steps I took to make sure the script is not misused. The coded subject format is:
You made “X” comments in “MONTH” “NAME”. Thank You!.
An example: You made 30 comments in July Enstine. Thank you!
It just has to be like that for now. If you are not comfortable with it that way, please don’t use it.
Blog commenting contest with MyCommentAuthors!
To get more activities on your blog through commenting, you may want to run some sort of commenting contest where the author with the highest number of comments wins a prize. My blogging friend, Adesoji Adegbulu contacted me about this and I was excited he already has a commenting contest powered by this plugin.
He will be selecting two winners this month of August 2014. $50 direct cash prize to the commentator with the highest number of comments and $20 to the second. Pretty idea isn’t it? So stop by his blog post here for more.
Help me promote this plugin!
I’ll be so excited to see you give me a hand in promoting this plugin. Blog about it, share it on social media, talk about it every where, etc
If you review it, please shoot me a mail with the url so I can stop by to share and promote.
If you have an idea how we can push this forward, please let me know.
So go grab your copy now!
Drop me a comment and let me know what you think.
As you comment, I’ll be using the very plugin to create a link of commentators for the current month. That means you’ll be on the list 😉
Thank you!
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