One of the hard things about blogging is the early days when you don't have a strong following and a loyal base of users who like to comment. Since blogging is supposed to be a two-way conversation, blogging without comments feels a little like talking to a wall. The good news is that even apart from those helpful bits of advice like "be patient" and "write better content" there are a few things you can do to help encourage blog commenting. Stephen Spencer shares three of them over at Business Blog Consulting.

As Stephen puts it, "Incentives work."

And really, why shouldn't you incentivize the people taking the time to comment on your blog. After all, comments are a huge part of blogging. In fact, I've heard time and time again that one of the reasons moms come back to my Lactivist blog is because they enjoy reading the thoughtful comments as much as they enjoy reading my posts. In other words, the people commenting at my blog are helping me build a better brand and a more loyal reader base. Why wouldn't I want to reward them?

Stephen offers up three tips, my favorite of which is:

Link Love — to motivate your commentors to post comments, because they'll get links and PageRank from you. Most blog platforms automatically nofollow the links in comments, so that no PageRank is transferred. This WordPress plugin removes the nofollow, so that your commentors will gain an SEO benefit from their comments.

If you're still working on creating a more active blog, ask yourself what you can do to share the wealth with the people who are helping you build your blog.