Similar to the other site you mentioned with multiple authors, you may soon invite guest bloggers to write for you, or cover a vacation for you.

Also, if you are linking up your other sites (like a personal inter-linked network), it may be helpful for people bouncing from one of your sites to the other to always see a byline as something familiar and standard on each of your sites. That way, there’s no guess-work on who wrote something.

You can see it in action over at http://www.EatingBritain.com and it really helps give the personal touch to posts and get direct visitor comment feedback, as you can see by the recent comments in the side bar.

Another little tip is, don’t show the date of each post. Then if you don’t post for a little while, most readers wont notice ;)

Dave

If your posts ‘close down’ the topic, then you’re placing a seed in the mind of the reader that: “‘Nuff said!” And that’s that.

Trying to finish without of solid conclusion can prompt people to fill in the blanks, but I find this really is topic-specific…

http://wow.alexanderbecker.net/blog/

Thanks Darren, we’ll see how it’ll work out.

I often ask for comments in a post, too, so it’s not like I’m trying to scare readers away from commenting.

Like Fitness_Guy, I also find that I get more comments when something I say is opinionated. Unfortunately, the comments are usually nasty blasts at me for what I have to say. (My posts about the Iraq War and outsourcing usually have that affect.) Not necessarily what I like to see, especially when few readers ever come to my defense.

Another blog-based site I run has multiple authors. Each article includes not just the byline at the top but a photo of the author. And that doesn’t get many comments either.

Of course, the hits on these sites might not be what you’d call substantial. Recently, they’re at about 3000 page hits a week. Not bad but certainly not anything to brag about.

But I definitely agree that reader comments can make a site more valuable to other readers. And to the blogger, too.

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/improving-website-conversion/landing-page-optimization.html

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t include it in its default themes, and very few themes include it at all.

Perhaps a how-to for adding the byline is in order. Here’s some sample code:

By: <?php the_author(); ?>

Displays your name.

For multi-author blogs, try this instead:

By: <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?>

Displays your name, linked to the “author page” which displays all posts by a single author.

Talia Mana
Centre for Emotional Well-Being
http://taliamana.blogspot.com

I found that it wasn’t until I started getting quite opinionated on my blogs about products or events that I got some reader interaction. I had wondered whether layout had anything to do with it too.