Commenting for traffic
This is the next installment in the generating traffic series so the 5 comment rule is in effect.
Commenting can deliver traffic to your site whether or not the blog follows comments or not if…
You add to the conversation. It really isn’t that hard. Stay away from the I like whatever, actually read the post and comment with your opinion. You really need to add something. A prefect example is the previous post here on article writing. Check out the comments and you will see that most added to the value of the article.
A few were just a thank you comment but quite a few either added good information (thank you) or asked for clarification.
Now here are some tips for finding good places to comment on. Search the keywords that you want to rank for are on your blog and take the time to go through and find the active blogs on these topics. You can also search at Technorati for your topics.
Add these into your Google Reader (one of my favorite tools) so you can see when they are updated all from one place.
There are definitely advantages to commenting sooner rather than later, Then everyone that reads the post will see your comment and you will get more people clicking through to your blog if you have added solid information to the conversation.
If they follow you will also get a link back to your blog if your comment gets approved and it will most times of you are adding to the conversation. Both of these will add traffic to your blog.
Finally you can trackback to posts you find that are a good resource. There was a good guest post over at John Cow blog about Traffic From Commenting and they just had a good video added there about Comment Hitching.
This will help me add back links here but…
It helps them because I am linking to their content and it helps you as a reader because I have found more quality content on this topic for you.
Anyone reading those posts at John Cow that comes back to this post is getting more of the content they are looking for.
Everyone wins.
Now if I tried to trackback on a different topic it would be spam. It would not help you the reader it would only be trying to get back links. The same thing with irrelevant comments that don’t add to the conversation.
The key whether you are commenting or tracking back is to add good content to your site and the other persons site.
As always your comments are welcomed and needed for the next post in this series.
Mike Paetzold
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5 comments
Laura Miller on October 5, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Hi Mike
I am enjoying your posts on this great stuff.
I have started finding blogs and posting comments and doing some backlinking and have found it increasing my traffic as you said.
It’s win win situation for everyeone.
keep these tips coming I am learning something new everytime, and when I take the action on it, it definitely has helped increase my traffic, not tons of traffic, but enough that it does make me want to go and do more of it
Laura
Mike on October 5, 2008 at 2:00 pm
@Laura Miller -
That is one of the big things. None of these things done just once will do much but doing them regularly will make it snowball.
Doug Champigny on October 5, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Great Post, Mike!
Like everything that works, the spammers have hit blogs hard with blog spam tools too. Once I put the do-follow tag in, I started getting 99% spam and 1% honest comments. If you run into that, I found the hashcash plugin eliminated almost all of the automated comment submissions.
Keep up the great series…
Doug Champigny.
mark smith on October 7, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Good info!!
Wow, it’s so true about adding comments that are worthwhile. I’m seeing more and more issues with spam and not sure exactly how to keep the percentage of quality comments up, meanwhile not turning it into a full time job, just monitoring comments. I often find, that if I can’t add something valuable to the conversation, then I just don’t comment. I wish that could be said for more folks. Any suggestions on how to manage this once you start to have more traffic?
Great information as always,
Mark
Joel Osborne on October 10, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Yep… it’s a great way to add quality back links to your site.
They are not just back links, but they are links from pages that are targeting similar keywords to your own pages, which I believe Google likes even more.
Also try to use good copy blog titles, so that it will draw people to read further, and hopefully comment.
Joel Osborne
Joel Osborne´s last blog post..Build Your List For Free