Web Traffic Tips: Blog Commenting
Feb 03
In this, the second post in the Web traffic tips series, we’re going to talk about blog commenting. I’ve done a couple posts already about how to actually post comments, as well as how NOT to comment on blogs. Today I’d like to talk about why we comment on blogs and how it helps us drive traffic.
- Image by premasagar via Flickr
There are two schools of thought when it comes to commenting on blogs.
1. Quantity
2. Quality
Each of these methods serves a purpose ~ and one may serve you better so let’s take a look.
Quantity:
The quantity school of thought is to get out there and find as many blogs as you can, and make a quick comment on all of them. The quantity school of thought generally uses blog commenting for the purposes of getting backlinks, and generally that’s seen the more the better.
Quality:
The quality school of thought tends to choose a few blogs that are related to their own topic and comment regularly on those blogs. They make insightful comments, ask questions, answer questions from other comments. They create a conversation and community.
So what’s better Quality or Quantity?
It depends on your purpose, what you’re trying to do. However, there are some serious benefits to using the Quality method.
1. People get to know you through your comments.
2. They begin to want to know more about you ~ so they click through to your site.
3. They already know/like ~ maybe even trust you so they’re likely to stay on your site longer, look around more, and possibly feel more comfortable to buy something.
4. They already know/like/trust you so they are more likely to share your site with someone else if they like what they see.
5. They already know/like/trust you so they are more likely to bookmark your site/grab the RSS feed and come back again.
6. Your comments have a greater chance of actually being published than “hey nice post” comments. If your comment is deleted by the blog owner you’ve wasted your time and effort.
7. The posts you make in the comments are there forever ~ new traffic comes to the post and will get to read your comment and so future traffic is also possible.
8. You begin to build a relationship with the blog owner and once you’re on their radar screen you’ve opened yourself up to someplace to guest post ~ to work together ~ and they may become a reader of your blog ~ and if your content is good they may even tell their entire audience about it.
While drive by commenting may not take as long ~ the benefits are really minimal. Your time is better spent finding a few blogs in your niche that you like to read ~ where you like the writer ~ where you like the other people that read the blog ~ and begin to be part of that circle. Start leaving comments when you have something that adds to the conversation.
Find maybe 5 blogs ~ add them to your RSS reader/Search homepage and put it on your list of daily money making actions. 30 minutes for blog commenting. Go to those 5 blogs ~ read the posts ~ and comment. If today’s post doesn’t rile up any comment in your go to the archives ~ read some of the back posts and comment there. It all counts.
If you can find blogs in your niche that use keywordluv or commentluv plugin all the better. Then you can have the best of both worlds. You can have your anchor text link to your site all while you’re building relationships on that site.
So… how do I find blogs to comment on?
You want to find blogs that will give you the best of both worlds ~ you want to get your links, AND you want to be able to take your coat off and stay a while. To do this you want to look for real blogs that are using some of the comment features that I use.
You want to find
1. Do follow blogs
2. Keywordluv plugin
3. Commentluv plugin
or a combination of the three.
Here is a great post that provides a fantastic tutorial on how to find do follow blogs ~ so if you need to know the exact how tos to do that I suggest you read it. It’s quite clear and makes finding the right kind of blogs quite easy.
So there you have it ~ an easy thing to do to start getting traffic to your blog. Add it to your daily tasks ~ don’t spend all day on this ~ 30 minutes is a good start. It’s also great if you have short periods of time that you find hard to get started on something, like 15 minutes here or there ~ just stop by one of your daily reads and make a comment. Make sure you vary the post you put in the url field of your comments so you can build some links to multiple pages of your site.
If you have any questions about blog commenting to drive traffic just ask in the comment section.
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My vote goes to quality cause today most of the people works smarter that harder.
Thanks for the great info. I would really like to encourage my blog readers to comment, not so much for their seo efforts, but to engage and interact with them on a more one-to-one, personal level.
Daniel Tetreault.
Victoria, BC.
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I’m so glad I found this post. I have been scouring the internet trying to find out how to find those blogs with kw luv. I even asked an IM “guru” and she just said to Google for it (which I did but couldn’t find that many blogs). Thanks again Jackie!
Lisa @ ameda purely yours electric breast pump´s last blog ..ameda purely yours electric breast pump updated Sun Aug 1 2010 12-43 pm CDT
Nice blog. to build a dofollow blog links and allow all customers access for linking to you got a great article there. I must agree on the fact that people get to know you through comments you make, also your comments will help you to build a healthy relationship with other bloggers and webmasters. This is useful for everyone when implementing dofollow blog and internal links on your web site.
Most of the times, I do quantity comments, but they are not just “this is great” comment. At least I read the article and leave a valuable comment. I only have few blogs that I love reading most and those are the blogs where I do quality comments.
I usually drop down comments with blogs that have commentluv installed because it parse my last blog post which I think is really helpful to promote my blog. Another idea is to comment on the latest blog post for you to be the first commentor because being the first one has more visibility.
There are lots of ways on how we can find do follow blogs, we can also use the google search queries like inurl: , intext: and intitle: which will help us to get specific or relevant search results. I also love doing blog comments and I believe that it should be done with passion.
jhoy@outrageous marketing´s last blog ..How To Storyboard Your Way To Business Success
I agree. Comments can be valuable information or great testimonials. Although, I am always cautious on which comments I should trust, I still think they are great marketing tools to drive traffic to your site. There are a lot of ways to make one’s website known. Invest your time learning some of these ideas and it will be a time well spent. Great post!
Hi Davina,
I do use video in quite a few of my blog posts ~ it is one of my goals to use more video. One problem I have is being able to see how to use video other than showing how I’m doing something. Like this post for instance. I don’t off hand see how I would have used video. I’d really like to know how you think I could have incorporated a video in this post. Please let me know. You can either comment or email me ~ anyone else for that matter ~ the topic is open for discussion.
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Have you ever thought about including videos with your weblog posts to have the readers even more entertained? I mean I just went through the whole post of yours and it was quite great but since I’m alot more of a visual learner, I found videos to be much more useful. well, let me know what you think.
I couldn’t agree more, the quantity of well written and valuable comments can help us create a healthier community for our website, and can drive traffic even convert them to sales if we gain their trust.
diocelin@website design münchen´s last blog ..XT Commerce Abonnement Modul
Blog commenting can really pay off if done correctly and with a plan as Jackie has written. And it’s not as hard as you think finding new blogs that interest you. You can use the tips linked to in this post or follow the links on your favorite blogs. Usually you’ll uncover one or two “diamonds”.
I love the idea to find few blogs and then becomes regular commentator there. I used to give comment in different blogs everyday, and I admit if it takes lot of time to find new blogs in daily basis. Thanks for this tips, I will do it. I hope it will help me to increase the traffic
I enjoyed your well written post, and the discussion that follows. I agree that the quality of your comment is much more important than generating a large quantity of comments that do not have any substantial value. Good content (such as the helpful insights you have shared) is important in a comment, as it is in a blog post, and also in a website. Thank you for sharing.
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Hi Jamie,
Thanks for the kind words. That is certainly one way to do things. There are many many ways to do things, you have to choose the one that works best for you. I would NOT suggest you use WP.com to create links back to your blog 1. It violates their TOS.
Personally I prefer to build a bigger site than just a one page product promotion to direct people to the product page. I think it’s easier to build trust and get the sale if I offer more content on my site. It’s also easier to get more traffic because you can target many different keywords on the blog and get traffic from a bunch of different keywords.
You can use any of the techniques in the “increase web traffic” category on this blog and any others you find. Most of the techniques I’ll be showing you this month will both build links to your site as well as drive traffic as well ~ so it’s like you do two for the price of one when you use them.
But it really comes down to finding traffic techniques that work for YOU, because no matter how great a technique is if you don’t do it, it won’t work.
That’s why I’m going to provide a bunch of different information over the month on driving traffic, so people can pick a few that work well for them ~ and they can then focus on those few.
hope that has answered your question.
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Their TOS clearly prohibits linking to sales related material (affiliate links, etc)…does a content blog fall into that realm if it merely has sales related links within IT.
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are you talking about wordpress.com? Because their TOS also state you can’t use the site to build links to boost another site. http://screencast.com/t/YjJiYzQ3YjU
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I’ve read that and honestly, it’s never been too clear to me. A simple “read more about this” link from a non-commercial type article is wrong?
Btw, Jing is sweet. lol
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Hi Jackie,
First of all, I would like to start by saying I love all the information that your taking the time to post to help us to understand internet marketing. It’s been very helpful for me and I really appreciate you very much. I’m glad you believed in yourself and proved your Hubby wrong.
I have a question for you. Say I wanted to build a WordPress blog (blog 1) on my niche and promote a product from ClickBank so I purchase a domain name and create my blog. Now I need to build links to this blog to get traffic, right? Is it best to create another blog/lens (blog 2) with a similar keyword and post only to that blog or lens with anchor text directed back to my blog (blog 1)? Then would you need to post to blog (blog 1) as well or just use it as a type of sales page to move your product? If this is the proper scenario and you went with building another blog (blog 2) would you need to purchase another domain name or use the free WP?
This is very confusing for me because people say that’s what you should do to get traffic to your site. I hope this all makes sense and you can help me to clear this up so I can better understand what I need to do.
Thanks for your time,
Jamie
You all see how that worked? Darrin ~ in the comment above added to the conversation. When I get notified that someone has commented I look at the comment (and because bots are soooo good now) I then look at the url they’re sending people to, and keywords they’re using. I’ll tell you most “bankruptcy” people’s comments don’t make it live to this site.
Thank you Darrin for your participation ~ your point about page rank is a good one.
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Quality is always better than quantity. Just imagine if you continue to create conversation in a certain blog post, this page will have a Page Rank. If that same page always get great content (conversations) then no doubt Google will give it a higher page rank and thus you will benefit more than just looking for blog posts and commenting stuff like “nice posts!” or “I love your blog!”
Quantity commenter don’t make it very far on my blogs, assuming they make it past Akismet (a pretty smart cookie, that one).
Follow Jackie’s tips long enough and soon you will master the art. Mastering the art in my opinion (as I feel I have) is being able to combine quality and quantity…I post 20-30+ quality comments almost daily and it truly pays off in the end.
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Nice post about commenting!
Oh wait, that is not the proper way to leave a comment. Sorry for the bad humor.
I totally agree that Quality is sooo much more important than Quantity. Relationship building is more important now than ever before. As more and more blogs are started it is important to build a realtionship and establish trust with the blog owner as well as other readers.
To me it is important that we all help each other. The owner of the blog may not have all the answers, however the readers of that blog may be able to help. I guess in someways it is similar to a forum in that people can help each other.
Thanks,
- RIck
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Make sure you come back and let us know the results. I think you might be surprised. It’s been my experience people want something that’s easy and they can get done for them. Which is why there’s so much drive by blog commenting. Grab a piece of software and put your comment in and then send the little bugger on his way. Who cares if your comment matches etc ~ it’s where the numbers game comes in. There will be a percentage of sites that the bot hits that aren’t moderated and your comment will get posted ~ you will get the links.
However ~ anyone who is serious about creating a great resource online and running a legitimate internet marketing business should really think about it before they make the decision between quantity and quality. Your reputation is one of the most important things online ~ drive by blog comments can quickly tarnish a good reputation and create a really bad one.
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Hi Jackie,
Your post gave us an idea to run a pool (in the future):
Quantity vs Quality.
We bet “Quality” will prevail (as most people prefer to work smarter than harder (at least they say it), but we will see.)
Good luck to you and can’t help saying we really like your blog.
Thanks for your interesting posts.
Lena & Dima
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Edward ~
Thanks for your comments. I think that it would be nearly impossible to read/comment on 100 blogs daily. I personally wouldn’t even try to do that. If Darren really does that my guess is his staff does it for him.
I would fit blog commenting in as 1 part of my traffic strategy. If you’re working on a niche blog the links from the comments on smaller blogs (plus whatever traffic you get from the comments themselves) can be more than enough to get ranked for some long tail keywords. Which is why it’s also important to try to find blogs using the plugins to help build good links back to your site.
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Great tips. I would like to add a few more points.
Spammers are all over the place nowadays. I’ve seen some of their software which makes their comments look very genuine to past through spam filters. I personally think that if someone is going for “quantity”, quality should be considered too. Bloggers don’t like to spam other blogs with comments and they hate it when people do that to them. Although we might not do it intentionally, bloggers normally delete those comments.
Joining a community and conversation is not a bad idea to get traffic. However, I believe 5 blogs is not sufficient unless we are aiming very popular blogs. I’ve tried commenting on 10 blogs and the traffic is not even sufficient to make some income for myself.
I agree with the part where you mentioned about picking a few blogs you like and comment on them regularly. Darren from problogger picked a few hundred. He subscribed to their RSS and read most of their feeds everyday.
Another thing I would like to share is that popular blogs normally don’t install plugin such as commentluv, keywordluv or other dofollow plugin (doesn’t mean your blog is not popular). This is because these plugins will attract spammers. They have software which helps them to look for blogs with those plugins and start their “work”. I used to have a popular blog with 1000 spam comments per day when I turned on the dofollow features on my blog.
Thanks for sharing some good information here. Hope my comment contributes to your blog
Okay – I learn something new everyday reading this blog – thank you. The link to the SEO blog was very helpful too!
Thanks so much for the link to seo your blog! What a helpful site!
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Hi Jackie,
Quick question. I went to statcounter to check my visits for one of my wordpress blogs I am working on and noticed in the left hand corner that you can sign up for 1000+ visitors for $9.99.
Have you ever used this service?
No I have not ~ and I probably wouldn’t recommend it.
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Great post, Jackie, and thanks for the link to SEO Your Blog, the post there was a huge help to me. Finding ‘do follow’ places for comments has been a real pill, and I had stopped leaving comments for the most part, because it seemed like such a waste of time. I do know that leaving comments boosts my page views, so I’m looking forward to being able to put this into action.
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Thank you so much for linking to my tutorial, you got a great article there. I must agree on the fact that people get to know you through comments you make, also your comments will help you to build a healthy relationship with other bloggers and webmasters.
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Blog commenting really does have a lot of nice benefits, like you discussed.
I love the fact that you can build relationships with people and this can lead to invites to become a guest blogger, and this will lead to even more exposure for you and your site.
Regards,
Kelly-Anne Foxley
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I’m not suggesting YOU use them on your blog. I’m suggesting you use that search query to find blogs in your niche that use them so you can comment on those blogs and get the benefit of them. When you comment on a blog (like this one) that uses one or more of those plugins you get the benefit of being able to link to your site using YOUR keywords ~ which is always a better link than linking with your name.
While of course building relationships at the blog and providing great conversation and content in your comments.
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Jackie,
I am not clear about using the “commentluv” and “keywordluv” plugin as the benefits for the readers. I think they are useful when you are interested in a particular related comment or keyword of the blog. Then go to that blog and read some more.
Please enlighten me if I am wrong.
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AWESOME post Jackie! I appreciate this post so much – as a newbie it’s been challenging for me to pick and choose between the good, vaulable information and the sales crap that is constantly thrown at us newbies. Thanks for being THE source for me!
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Here’s an article that clearly explains what do follow is. http://www.inlineseo.com/blog/2008/03/15/what-is-dofollow-what-is-nofollow-follow-along-and-see/
You’re not being obtuse ~ these are pretty weird things.
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Hi Jackie,
What exactly does do follow and no follow mean? Sorry for being so obtuse.
Thanks,
Michele
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