If you want to grow the traffic numbers on your blog, it’s important that you encourage comments from your visitors. You can do this by posing questions at the end of your posts, for example. The Top Commentators plugin can also do a lot to encourage commenting, because the people who leave the most comments get a “dofollow” link in the sidebar. You may have also seen the CommentLuv plugin that has been installed on a number of sites around the blogosphere.

Another useful plugin that may encourage increased comment activity on your blog is the Social Profiles WordPress Plugin. In this age of the Internet, people are more interactive and social than ever, setting up profiles at a wide range of social networking and social bookmarking sites. You probably have an account on Digg and Flickr, for example.

With this plugin, a comment can come with links to the reader’s social profiles on these websites. The plugin supports twelve such social networking sites, including Furl, MySpace, and Twitter. Just as people enjoy driving traffic to their blogs directly, they’d also like to attract attention to their profiles on these sites as well. The catch with this particular plugin is that the user must first be registered with your blog. You could use this as another added form of encouragement.

The Social Profiles WordPress Plugin can be found at sugarrae.com.