Isnt the internet a great place?! Where else can someone come up with a great idea that you can steal, and make even better so easily?

Gary Conn posted a great idea in his blog explaining a great way to encourage comments from his RSS subscribers. Basically he made a cool graphic that links to the comment form on the post:

This graphic will show up in the RSS reader of his subscribers, and makes it really easy for them to click and make a comment on his posts.

Why should you care about encouraging comments on your blog?

Gary’s problem was that he has hundreds of RSS subscribers but he wasnt getting many comments on his posts. Not only did this make him feel unloved, but he realizes that comments on your blog are an important way to make readers feel like part of the ‘community’, they’re a great way to get feedback from your readers, and most important of all – comments are a form of user-generated content that help to feed the search engine spiders. More “stuff” on your blog means more for the SE bots to index, eventually resulting in more search-engine hits to your blog. When I was building GrownUpGeek.com, I realized this very early on, and did everything I could to encourage visitors to comments on pages. This idea eventually led to creating the forums area of the site, which is now responsible for at least 75% of our traffic and the majority of our earnings via premium memberships.

Anyway, back to stealing Gary’s idea.

I decided that I would start doing the same thing. I created a graphic of my own (not as pretty as Gary’s, but it will do):

But as soon as I started to paste the code for this graphic into a new post I realized that it was going to be a lot of work. Writing the post, pasting the code, saving the post, getting the URL, editing the post, updating the code with the URL for the post, and then saving it. Oh man, what a way to waste 45 seconds of my life!

I posted a comment on Gary’s blog and asked if he was using an automated method for this like modifying his template file, but his response was that he was doing it basically the same way as I was. It’s such a pain to do he even took the time to make a video explaining how to do it (thanks Gary!)

So I decided to save my readers and Gary some time by showing you how to add your comment graphic (or anything) to every post automatically by making some quick changes to your WordPress INDEX.PHP file.

WARNING:

Before you even think about touching your INDEX.PHP file, back it up! You can easily do this by copying & pasting it from your WordPress Theme Editor into a notepad document and saving it, or by making a copy from your server via FTP/SFTP.

So here is how to add a graphic with a link to the comments section of every post automatically to all posts (old and new):

First, make your graphic. Don’t steal Gary’s because he probably would not like that, and don’t steal mine, because it’s not worth stealing. Upload your image file into WordPress and take note of it’s URL.

Then, In your INDEX.PHP file, find the section that looks like this:
<?php the_content(__('Read more'));?>
Right after that section, paste in this code:
<center><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>#respond"><img src="http://yourdomain.com/path/to/your/comment.gif" alt="Got something to say? Post it!" /></a></center>

Save your INDEX.PHP, clear your cache if you have it enabled, and take a look at some of your posts. If you did it right, you should see your new comment-grabbing graphic at the bottom of every post, with a link to the corresponding comments section.

If you use Feedburner for your feeds, you should also turn on the “Comments Count” in the “FeedFlare” section – this will add the number of current comments and a link to post new comments at the bottom of every post in your subscriber’s RSS reader.

Thanks for the idea Gary, and you’re welcome for making it easier for you

Update: Before you try this, better read THIS POST