Comment Relish

I have been using WordPress for a few months as my blogging platform for www.ashchuan.com/blog and one of the great advantages of using WordPress for blogging is its vast number of plug-ins that are available online. The plug-ins are “gold” because some are really useful in extending the power of WordPress as a blogging platform.

Recently I came across a comment plug-in called Comment Relish when I was reading Gobala Krishnan’s easywordpress.com web site. The plug-in is created by Justin Shattuck but Gobala Krishnan found a good use for it which he talked about in his post entitled “Turn One-Time Commenters Into RSS Subscribers”.

Most of us bloggers know that driving genuine traffic to your web site is not an easy task and keeping returning visitors is even harder. Gobala devised a strategy to use Comment Relish as a platform to reach a new visitor with hope that the visitor will be converted into a returning visitor and eventually a fan.

Quoting Gobala Krishnan:

“Most people who visit your site and happen to comment on a post never return later to subscribe to your RSS feeds. In other words, you’re losing out on potential subscribers simply because you never followed up with them and invited them to join your feeds.

That’s exactly what the Comment Relish plugin does: It follows up for you!”

According to Gobala Krishnan, Mert Erkal of SearchForBlogging.com used this plugin and found that it helped him double his RSS subscription rate! I think this strategy is worth trying out.

What is Comment Relish?

Comment relish is a WordPress plugin developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your website who have never commented before. The message dispatched to the user is defined within the plugin’s preferences. Numerous tags have been integrated to allow for information to be included in the message easily (I.E.: timestamp, author name, comment, ETC.).

Gobala Krishnan’s post: “Turn One-Time Commenters Into RSS Subscribers“