This week the goal is to find 10 blogs in your niche or related to your niche to follow. This can be really easy right? Just go out there and pick some blogs. Yes, it can be that easy, but today I’m going to give you some tips about how you can choose blogs to follow so you can best leverage your time and effort.
1. Regularly and Consistently Updated
You want to choose blogs that are active. This means the person (like you) is updating their content 3 to 5 times a week. You want/need regular/consistent new content to comment and interact with.
2. Active comments section
You want to choose blogs that have an active comment section. This means there is already a good community going on at this site. A good community means it’s much easier for you to create relationships not only with this blogger, but with other people in the blogger’s community.
An active comments section gives you opportunities to go to the blogs of other commenters and check them out, maybe get involved in that community as well.
An active comments section also gives you more eyes on your links, and more traffic coming to your blog (for the same reason you go to other people’s blogs when they comment).
3. Commentluv
This is an excellent way to leverage your time and effort. I used to just follow any blog that I thought was interesting. (I still do to some extent, but I read those in my own time, not work time). Now I generally follow blogs that use the commentluv plugin. In the same amount of time I can create 2 links back to my site. One back to my homepage (in the url field) and one back to my latest post (in the commentluv link). This is 2 links for the time of one.
The other benefit of following commentluv blogs is they almost always use “do follow” which means your links will get some extra juice where Google is concerned.
4. Keywordluv
Much the same benefits as commentluv, however with keywordluv you can also create a keyword anchor text link in the name field as well. This is ideal so your homepage link also becomes a keyword link. Many times you’ll find bloggers will use both keyword and commentluv plugins on their site.
If I had to choose between one or the other, I’d always choose commentluv (and it took me a while to get to this point lol) just so I can have 2 links instead of 1 for every comment.
5. Linky Communities
I don’t look for every blog I follow to have a linky attached to it. If you’re not familiar with linkies they are basically weekly community events. Each week you do something and then you go back and put your link in the linky thing and it shows up as a link to your site for everyone to see.
I participate in Menu Plan Mondays over at Orgjunkie.com.
While it is not a commentluv blog I participate because the number of people who also participate is HUGE. AND they often check out many of the other menu plan blogs. So by having my link in the linky I get quite a bit of traffic, and it’s targeted traffic. People trying to do the same thing ~ create a weekly meal plan.
There are linky things like this for many many topics. If you’d like to participate in your niche you can go to google and put in a keyword and then linky or mclinky and see what comes up. You may find your niche has a linky community too! These are also called memes ~ so you could google that too, but googling linky will pull up specific blogs ~ because they will contain those words within them. There’s a meme for every day of the week just about ~ so you’re bound to find something that works for your site.
There you have 5 ways to choose blogs to follow. Before I leave you today I’d like to just go over the very basic basics of leaving a comment on a blog.
When you get to the blog comments section you’ll find there are 4 fields (areas to put information).
1. Name
2. email
3. url/website
4. comment area
Remember, we are commenting to create relationships, with the blogger and the other readers. So make sure your comment is relevant ~ not about your site, but about your experience, and relevant to the content in the post you’re commenting on.
That’s it for today. I’d love to hear how you’re doing finding blogs to connect with. Have you found any good ways to find cool blogs I haven’t mentioned? Let us know!
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=b3a5b0dc-ce96-444b-a42a-bf7d44bc72fc)
Other Posts That Might Help:
Jackie, I'm back. Thanks I have puzzled this commentluv thing out. I know now my mistake was not to put my homepage URL in, but one of the other URL's! Stupid, I know.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like