Kajabi How To: Add Comments to Your Blog Posts (!!)

Let's make our blogs welcoming and interactive with the use of Blog Post Comments! Here's where you'll get step-by-step instructions with screenshots.

Start using Kajabi's new blog widget feature that lets you style your comments to match your brand. No more yucky invasive Disqus, yay!

Let's Celebrate 🎉 New Feature for the Kajabi Blog

First, can we have just have a moment of pure unadulterated JOY!?!?

KAJABI ADDED BLOG COMMENTS!!!!

I've wished for this nearly every day since I started blogging on Kajabi in 2016. I've submitted endless requests.

Yes, Kajabi has integrated with Disqus for comments for years. 

But I've never been a fan of Disqus. (That's putting it nicely). I explain why here: Kajabi How To: Add Disqus Comments to Your Blog Posts. (Once you read that, you won't care for them either).

So to say I'm thrilled that Kajabi now has provided us with another option to have Comments on our blogs???? Is a true understatement.

But maybe you're not interested in all that background so you know what? I have to get it off my chest but I'm not going to bore anyone who's not here for that, lol.

If you want all the Comments tea, keep reading past the instructions 😂

Kajabi How To: Add Comments to Your Blog Posts

Let's get to the reason you ARE likely here: To get step-by-step instructions on how to add Comments to your blog posts in Kajabi. 

I got you. And, good news: It's actually very simple (even if it looks complex).

The TL;DR of it

If you're an experienced Kajabi user, you may not need all the screen shots, extra instructions, and examples of what I did. You just want the short-version instructions so here you go. Have a blast 🚀

How to Add Comments to Your Kajabi Blog Posts - Brief Instructions without Screenshots

1. Go to Website, Design, Customize

2. In the top middle dropdown menu, click Blog Post

3. Under the Settings tab, make sure you don't have Disqus Comments set up; if you do, untick the box that says "Show Disqus Comments." Delete or keep your Disqus Shortname; doesn't matter.

4. Under the Sections tab, Add Section, click Learn More on Custom Widgets

5. On the left, scroll down to find and click Comments

6. Go through each of the settings to style your Comments how you want them

7. Important settings:

a. Under Look and Feel (palette icon), set Comments Width to Custom and Custom Width at least 900px.

b. Under Settings (gear icon), add your email if you want notifications of new comments.

c. Under Settings (gear icon), set Show Comments Per Website to OFF and Show Comments Per URL Path to ON.

8. Once you're done, have hit Save Changes, and are back in the Kajabi editor, set the widget block at 9 columns. Then style the rest of that block as you like.

Dunzo! Only 8 steps. NOICE 👊🏼.

How to Add Comments to Your Kajabi Blog Posts - Detailed Instructions with Screenshots

This section is for you if you'd like more direction and screenshots to guide you. 

Note: Don't worry if my screenshots don't match EXACTLY what you see on your end. I use a custom 3rd-party theme that has a bunch more features than any other blog/website theme.

So at times my screen will have extra boxes and things that you won't see unless you're using the same theme. No worries! This process will still work for you ✌🏼

Here we gooooo!!

1. Click Website, then Design

2. Click the "Customize" button on top right

3. In the top middle dropdown menu, click Blog Post

4. Click the Settings tab, then Disqus Comments - we're going to make sure you don't have Disqus Comments activated.       

If the box that says "Show Disqus Comments" is checked, uncheck it. 

Note: You can keep your Disqus Shortname in place if you like; it won't hurt anything OR you can delete it. I kept mine on the off-chance I need to reactivate Disqus for some reason, like showing someone else how to use it :) Then I don't have to remember or go look up my Shortname.

Okay, now we're all in the clear with Disqus Comments. Good riddance, I say!! (Never been a fan ... gotta whole blog post about Disqus Comments).

5. Now click the Sections tab, then Add Section

If you use the Kajabi Papers theme like I do, yours will look similar to this:

If you're using a regular Kajabi theme, it'll look something like this:

5. When you click Add Section, the new Website Widgets info will pop up. Click "Learn More".

6. Even if you know you're going to use your 1 free Website Widget for Comments and leave it at that, you'll need to click "View plans" to choose your free or paid option.

7. If this is your first time utlizing Kajabi's new Website Widgets feature - and you only plan to use this 1 widget for Comments, that's it - you'll click the Get Started button at the bottom under "Free $0/year".

My button is greyed out because I have a paid plan, the one called Basic. I'll talk about that later in this blog post, if you're interested why I chose that.

If you know you want one of the paid plans, go ahead and go through that signup process now. It walks you through everything, easy peasy.

Okay, now that you're all signed up for Website Widgets via Common Ninja. What in the heck is Common Ninja? It's a 3rd-party integrating with Kajabi to provide Comments and other widgets. More on that below.

Now it's time to set up your Comments widget!

On the top right, you'll see your allotment of widgets based on what plan you just chose. If you're using the Free plan, that will say "1/1 widgets used" (mine shows 1/10 because I paid for the Basic Plan).

In the middle, a rather garish (? ha) example of a Comments feature you can design. Although if pink and orange are your thing, who am I to say? 😂

Fear not, you can totally customize just about everything you want to in your own Comments widget, mm kay?

8. On the left, you can either Search Widgets to find Comments or just scroll down to it. Click Comments.

This is where you set up the look and feel of your Comments widget along with its functionality. It might look a little scary but don't let it intimidate you. You are powerful and strong. You will NOT let a comment box widget setup with tons of options get the better of you. YOU GOT THIS. Let's just take it slow, okay? Deep breathssssss ....

One at a time, just click the icons along the left side.

9. First one is Skins; that's where you pick the color of the Comments space itself. You can't tell from the screenshot but a White color is activated so the Comment shows as white.

For Comment Skins, you can only choose one of the available colors; I couldn't find any way to choose my own branding color or use a hex code there. I like White comment boxes anyway but bummer there's no choice 👎🏼

10. Before we leave this screenshot, please note the options in the top bar:

Undo and Redo buttons - Always a very handy feature!

Change Background - Here, I have the transparent background activated. You can also make it white or black which, depending on the Skins color you're using, might make it easier to see your design.

Preview - See what your design looks like on desktop, iPad, or mobile.

Save Changes - The ever-important "save all your work as you go" button. However, I believe it's going to kick you back to Kajabi whenever you click it. Hopefully, it has auto-save. I should look into that, lol. 

11. When you get to Look and Feel (the artist palette icon), please note there are both Basic and Advanced tabs.

Look and Feel, Basic tab, Font Type - You can change the font to match your brand. I count 47 fonts, similar to the average fonts you'll find most places.

Comments Width - Make that "Custom"

Custom Width - Change to at least 900px

Don't ask why. Just trust. Shhhh .... 🤫

12. Advanced tab - You can spend about 3 weeks in here but don't do it 😂 You can get REAL precise and fiddly with things like buttons and such. I mean YIKES! Don't go down the rabbit hole. The presets are pretty good for the most part. 

One thing I did was go change all the fonts to one of my brand fonts and the upvote/downvote color because I wanted them more visible. But I'd say just finish up your Comments widget, call it Version 1, and perfect it later, when you've been using it on your site for a while.

Listen to your Auntie Erika here. Don't get caught in the weeds of all these options! The important thing is to get Comments added to your blog posts 🔥

13. a through e., ha

Settings (gear icon), General - Set this up however you like. 

Email Required - I turned it on. It cuts down on comment spam. Who wants spam?!? NOBODY!! 

Manually Approve Comments - At first, I had it turned on. I was thinking it would be another good way to cut down on comment spam. But then I turned it off. I don't want to inconvenience readers who are taking the time to comment on my blog unless I have to. So I'm going to test it and go from there.

Maximum Number of Comment Submissions - I set that at 20, again, to try and avoid comment spam.

Skipping down to Visibility - I left all those on but do you, babe.

14. Settings, Comments Display Mode - Here's what you need to know, as per the screenshot above:

Show Comments Per Website - Turn OFF. 

Show Comments Per URL Path - Turn ON. 

This is so Comments will display only on the page you're activating them on (like individual blog post pages) and only comments from that page, not from your entire site.

Clear as mud? If you want all the nitty-gritty details, just click the little purple "i" icon to see this.

Hang in there! We're almost done 👍🏼

15. Just keep clicking the icons along the left side and do your best setting things up. You can always come back later and edit things. In fact, you most likely will and more than once.

16. Under Notifications (the bell icon), I wanted to point out this one: Notify me on new submissions. I assume you want to get an email every time someone leaves a comment on your Kajabi blog, right? YES so you can answer their question or respond to their comment quickly!

This is where you set that up. Just toggle on the feature, then enter your email under Send Notification To. As it says, you can enter one or more email addresses. Put each one on a new line.

17. As for the Email Subject Line which reads "New Comment Submission" out of the box, I added hyphen (-) ErikaFriday.com. That's because I'll be using this on more than one blog. Thought it would be cool to see at a glance which blog the comment is coming from. 

18. Once you've explored and filled in each of the feature areas in your Common Ninja widget, hit Save Changes one last time. You can also Preview your widget and how it will look on desktop, iPad, and mobile. 

Okay, that's pretty much It as far as setup goes, woo hoo! You are now the proud owner of an awesome Blog Comments feature on your Kajabi Site!

How To Finish Your Kajabi Blog Comments Setup

Once you hit Save Changes in Common Ninja, it should've taken you back into your Kajabi editor, which you now may need to style.

Play with the Column Width. I used 9 columns to start then changed it to 10 to match up with the heading I made above it (with a text box). See what works best aesthetically for your blog. 

Do you want to add a Background Color? I used the widget skin in white so I added one of my brand colors (pale yellow) under Background. This is so it stands out against my mostly white blog post background.

Also, if you have an opt-in section or two at the bottom of your blog posts, figure out how to arrange and color all of that. You want your Comments section to be visible and have the importance you'd like it to - whether Comments are your first priority - or maybe you want them more in the background because getting opt-ins is your first priority.

Remember: "A confused mind does nothing." So keep it as simple and easy to navigate as you can. Now that we have all these fancy options, we may need to show some restraint and not use them ALL 😂

How the New Comments Look vs the Old Comments

Here's tthe New "Common Ninja" aka "Website Widgets" Comments

See how in the first one, at the bottom is a white bar that says "No comments"? Yeah, it's gonna look like that on every one of your blog posts ... until the first person leaves a comment. Ugh. So far, that's the only "Con" I've found about Common Ninja blog comments.

Here's what it looks like once you have a comment entered.

Here's the Disqus Comments

(Good riddance! I'm so glad to get rid of Disqus Comments on my blog. They were better than nothing all these years; that's about the only nice "comment" I can make, bwahaha!)

Back to the Beginning: Why We're So Happy About Kajabi Blog Comments 

In case you're wondering why I'm so stinkin' happy about this seemingly minor development, lol  ....

The 2 options we had for the longest

When I joined Kajabi and immediately started using their blogging feature, there were 2 options for blog post comments.

1. Facebook - We could follow an eleventy-million-step process to use Facebook's developer tool to incorporate Facebook comments. I'm not a developer. Are you a developer??? Nah, we're just bloggers who want to blog, creators who want to create.

Not only were they near impossible to set up correctly, they also glitched all the time. I'd go through this agonizing setup process and a few weeks later 💨💥💨 they would just disappear.

Also, there was no way to moderate comments nor be notified when someone left a comment. So I'd have to routinely scroll alllll the way down to the bottom of every single one of my posts to see if there were new comments that needed responses. (I believe in responding to every single comment). 

2. Disqus - Man, I just have to shake my head. What a miserable choice. So many downsides. They're all in my Disqus blog post. The main issue is that hidden in their terms, Disqus admits that they reserve the right to append THEIR affiliate links to anything on YOUR site. Not just your blog; your site.

So say you have a Resources page containing your own affiliate links which make you a little extra cash when readers click on them and make a purchase. Well, how about Disqus swoops in and puts their affiliate links on your site too? So they can make money off the content you worked so hard on and you pay to host. Are you good with that? Because I'm sure not. /rant

Then one of the options went away

When the Premier website theme was replaced with the Encore theme (several years ago?), we lost the #1 option shared above, Facebook Comments. That left us with only Disqus which I begrudgingly used ... until NOW, woo hoo!

But in between, there were MANY requests to Kajabi for blog comments, by myself and others, via their user group, customer surveys, idea board submissions, conversations with their staff, etc.

I also did external searches for 3rd-party Comments alternatives I could implement with my Kajabi blog. I paid for Elfsight for 3 years because they had a "Coming Soon" page for a Comments widget ... that never materialized. I paid all that money for nuthin'. 

I researched, tested, and in some cases paid for options like POWR.io, FastComments, CommentBox, and HyvorTalk. For various reasons, none of them worked for me, and they all had a pricetag, which I was trying to avoid because of already paying for Kajabi. 

I just kept hoping Kajabi would eventually come up with either inherent blog comments inside Kajabi or a 3rd-party solution that wasn't Disqus. We bloggers have never understood why Products can have Comments but blog posts can't? Anyhoo ...

So if you were kind enough to take the time and read all of that 👆🏼 .... now you understand why I'm so happy!!! This new option doesn't appear to have any negatives to it that I can see.

CommonNinja.com seems like a nice, normal company who isn't stealing from us. 

One Negative to the Current Kajabi Blog Comments

Well, I originally thought I'd found a "con" to using them - but I stand corrected! 

My impression from researching it online was that Kajabi users on the free Website Widgets plan would be restricted to 300 pageviews per month. To be sure, I contacted Kajabi support and that was confirmed. 

However, now I'm told that's not true, straight from the Project Manager at Kajabi, yay! He clarified that Kajabi is NOT applying the page view limits for their Heroes at any tier. 

He said he'll be sure their help center articles are updated to clarify that information so it's more clear, which is awesome. 

I'm the first to admit when I'm WRONG and I was super happy to be wrong about limited pageviews, phew!

Pricing for Kajabi's NEW Blog Comments Option

Here's Kajabi's pricing chart for Website Widgets so you can see what your options are.

Since I'd already started a Free Common Ninja account 2 months before Kajabi announced this integration, I wondered ... should I just pay Common Ninja directly? Is there any advantage to doing so?

But when I crunched the numbers, as you can see in the comparison below, paying via Kajabi's Website Widgets feature is clearly going to save money on Common Ninja widgets. Wow, significantly! That's great to know.

Pricing via Kajabi Website Widgets

Free 1 widget with 300 pageviews

Starter 3 widgets with unlimited pagviews for $55/year 

Basic 10 widgets with unlimited pageviews for $135/year

Premium 25 widgets with unlimited pageviews for $270/year

Pricing via Common Ninja website

Free 1 widget with 300 pageviews

Essentials 3 widgets with unlimited pageviews for $65/year

Pro 10 widgets with unlimited pageviews for $230/year

Ultimate 25 widgets with unlimited pageviews for $780/year

*All pageviews limits are per month; $ amounts are rounded

Why I Chose the Basic Annual Plan for Kajabi Website Widgets

For me, it's very simple. The free plan only covers 300 pageviews per month and mine exceed that. 

Since I have to upgrade to a paid plan anyway, I decided to bypass the Starter option with only 3 widgets and go straight to the Basic plan with 10 widgets. Figured there were other widgets I'm excited to try and that will add to the functionality of my blog, products, sales pages, etc. so why not?

Also, as a Kajabi Verified Expert and service provider, I want to be knowledgable about the widgets so I can help others in using them.

All stock photo images courtesy of George Milton via Pexels.com

One last thing about pricing for Kajabi Blog Comments

As it stands now, if you upgrade to a paid account via Kajabi for your widget(s), you can only pay monthly if you pay Kajabi monthly or annually if you pay Kajabi annually.

However, straight from the project manager again is this: They're currently working on split cadence billing to ensure that there's flexibility with how you want to pay for web widgets -- monthly or annually (regardless of how you pay for your Kajabi subscription). Stay tuned!

Okay, phew! That was a looooong post. If you actually read the whole thing, here's a medal 🏅😂 and my undying love 💕

As you can see below, I've turned off Disqus comments and activated the new Comments feature by Common Ninja. 

What do you think? Please leave me a .... COMMENT! Let's get this party started! 

xo,