The folks behind Disqus are brilliant.  They have taken the concept of leaving comments, souped it up, tricked it out and turned it into a lean mean community building machine.

This is truly one of the most perfectly designed plugins I have ever used.  It is easy to install, easy to manage and makes starting or joining a discussion insanely easy and enjoyable.

BTW, while this article is mostly about the Disqus Wordpress plugin this system will work on nearly any sort of website or blog.

Under The Hood

One of the main components of Disqus is the totally kicking Disqus profile.  Think of this as your universal management tool for your other online identities.  You can pre-authenticate your Twitter, Facebook, or Open ID and reblog your comments across multiple services such as Tumblr, Wordpress, Movable Type, and Typepad.

If you have left comments using your Twitter, Facebook or OpenID all those comments will be automatically merged into your Disqus profile.

The Dashboard:  Moderating

Disqus integrates right into the built in Comments section of your WP dashboard.  However, you also have the power to moderate and control comments/discussions on multiple sites from a single dashboard or even your mobile phone.

You can choose to read and filter comments before they are posted, get email notification of new comments or setup additional moderators to help you keep an eye on things.

Their moderating tools are just too numerous to list, suffice it to say that make things as slick, flexible and as streamlined as possible.

Power Steering: Commenting

Commenter’s can post quickly and easily.  They don’t need to subscribe to anything they can sign in using their Facebook, Twitter or OpenID with the click of a button.

Not only can comments be posted on your website, commenters can easily share the discussion with their friends and followers.

Hit The Nitrous (NOS)!

A particularly sweet feature is the pop-up profile.  Just the other day I ran across a very insightful comment about a problem I was having with a website I was building.  The commenter was obviously very well informed and their expertise fell in line with my own.  A simple mouse hover on their avatar and I could quickly choose to share their comment, follow or friend them and/or see what other conversations they taken part in recently.  It was this last ability, to see other conversations that led me to discover a great new website I was totally unaware of.

Another is the ability to enable Disqus to give readers a comprehensive list of comments, mentions and the like related to your post from across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, FriendFeed, Digg and more.  This gives your visitors the “big picture” all in one place without them bouncing around from site to site or being isolated in one place.

There are tons more features and cool bells and whistles with Disqus.  I hope I have intrigued you enough to at least give it a test drive.  I guarantee you won’t be sorry.

You know all about the funnel method of upselling. But did you have ever applied that model to your blogging efforts?  If you haven’t then you probably aren’t leveraging as effectively as you could be.

Here is a very simple illustration of the funnel method as it applies to blogging.  At the very top are your marketing efforts to drive people to your site and their initial awareness.  This initial awareness phase is absolutely critical and you want to make the very best first impression you possibly can.  Equally important is to find ways to leverage this fabulous first impression into a budding relationship.

In the blogging world your first opportunity to start building relationships is when someone leaves a comment on a post.  Normally there are two types of commenters:

Someone who’s been reading your blog for quite some time

• A New, first time commenter
• Both of these require specific actions on your part but in this article we are going to concentrate on responding to first time commenters.

There are two hard and fast rules of thumb that apply to any sort of comment to your blog:

1. Respond To Them – you are building relationships remember.  Replying lets them know you care about what they have to say and it builds or re-enforces a sense of community.
2. Do It Sooner Rather Than Later – this can be hard to do but again this fosters a sense of community and communicates your commitment to your blog and your readers.

One of the most powerful tools you can use to really capture the attention of your first time commenter’s is via the Comment Redirect plugin for Wordpress.  This is a super nifty little plugin that automatically redirects first time commenter’s to the webpage of your choice.  I recommend a thank you page or a combo thank you upsell page.  Here is an example I created for a client that thanks the commenter and encourages them to sign up on her mailing list. http://www.drivingir.com/a-big-thank-you

I love this little gem it covers the two rules and requires no effort on my part once it is in place.  Anything I can automate I love!!

Finally, here are a few other things you can do to turn first time commenters into long time readers.

1. Comment on their blog

This is often overlooked.  Approximately 70% of those who leave a comment on your blog have a blog of their own.  Commenting back on their blog will make you stand out in their mind and really shows your interest in them.  This will make them more inclined to come back to your blog and comment again!

2. Send them a personal email

Once you have developed a bit of communication via exchanged comments you should send them a short personalized email.  There are some plugins that will do this automatically but I am not sure that is the ideal way to do this.  For one thing the email goes out as soon as they comment, for another thing they to come across canned and impersonal AND they tend to get caught in the spam folder.

By waiting a few days to send out an email to you provide the commenter with another reason to return to your site AND you re-enforce your presence in their train of thought.  (Remember the pharse …  people normally need to see things three times before they act on it.)

You don’t have the time to do this?  That’s what your VA is there for, outsource it!

3. Show them your best content

This is really more like detailed directions on how to effectively use Step 2 and almost all the bloggers out there totally over look this fabulous opportunity.

When you are creating your personalized email include a few links to some of your best blog posts or perhaps to a specially created landing page that highlights your best posts and some basic info about your or your business.  You could even include a short teaser lead in to your first level products and/or services.

Doing this exposes them to the best of your blog and gives them a reason to stay on your blog longer than the time they spent reading that one initial post that they found via a Google search.  Seeing the best of your best will hopefully show them they should be following your blog.  It will also highlight your expertise and show them that they are in good hands with you.