ProBlogger: A Blog Commenting Strategy

Posted: 13 May 2011 06:07 AM PDT

This guest post is by Joe of Web Programming 360.

When I first started my blog, about two months ago, I had a hard time getting five visitors a day. I got so tired of doing so much work to end up being a nobody on the side of the highway. One lucky day, I decided to convert all of the popular blogs traffic to my little blog.

Why and how? Well, readers of the popular blogs are high converters and very targeted to my blog. More than likely, they will stay on my blog for more than five minutes. Chances are that my content, which I work so hard to produce, will finally pay off into thousands of subscribers!

There are two different ways to get traffic from those A+ blogs. While one is more valuable than the other, the other is easy and fast. First is guest posting. Yes: guest posting. But have no fear! The next source of blog traffic is blog commenting.

Blog commenting is so easy, even leaving a sentence can supply you with an excellent 50 unique visitors. Then possibly another ten subscribers will come out of that group, since it’s so targeted. What are the steps for driving traffic through commenting on other blogs?

1. Find popular, targeted blogs

Before commenting, you need to know exactly where to comment. If your blog’s about dog training and you comment on Web Designers Ledger, you should know the amount of traffic will be little and the SEO gain may be zero. The most important thing in blog commenting is the blog you comment on. If you get that wrong, then your whole comment traffic strategy collapses.

Let’s find the blogs you want to comment on. This is really easy. What’s your niche? For example, if I was trying to find blogs for Darren at ProBlogger to comment on, I’d Google “blogging blogs.” He’s in the blogging niche and we’re looking for blogs. Combine that to get “blogging blogs.”

Searching for blogging blogs

The first result actually gives us a huge list of the top 25 blogging blogs. You can comment on every single one of those blogs every day to receive an extra hundred—or possibly thousand—visitors a day.

But wait! How will you know when they update those blogs? You may not want to be constantly checking 25 blogs every day. That’s a time- and work-waster.

2. Receive blog updates automatically

RSS is a life-saver here. RSS, Really Simple Syndication, gives you instant updates for any blog whenever they occur. To start using RSS you need an RSS reader. I prefer Google Reader as it seems to be fast efficient and checks for new listings in the RSS feeds constantly. My Google Reader is a great example…

Google Reader

I am subscribed to eleven blogs that are updated around once a day. What do I like best about Google Reader? The related RSS feature gives you RSS feeds similar to the current RSS feeds your subscribed to. If I looked under Recommended Items, I would find a bunch of related blogs to comment on. I think that’s really helpful when you have trouble finding popular blogs related to yours—finding one and adding it to Google Reader will give you other similar blogs to comment on.

3. Consider quality and placement

I hope you’ve realized that in order to drive traffic to your blog through commenting, your comment needs to be in the top five or three comments. Being first counts more than you think. It’s just like Google: you’re trying to rank #1, #2, or #3.

Sometimes in order to complete a tough task like that, you might think you’ll need to rush through the article and just say something random. Wrong! Don’t ever do that. It will be obvious that all you’re trying to do is get traffic. Being third is better than being first if your comment makes relevant sense and provides a valuable bonus for the readers.

One other thing: always read the article. If you don’t read it, you won’t be able to comment with relevance and insight. Headlines may be misleading so always read the article.

What about replies? Some blogs allow you to reply to other comments. If you were too late and there have already been 20 comments on a post, why not reply to the first comment to get an awesome position, plus a great quality comment? Replies are only helpful when the quality of the comment is super-high, though. It must be an actual reply to the first comment, not just a comment for the sake of commenting. While it doesn’t have to be long, your comment should contain very valuable information.

4. What fourth step?

That’s how easy commenting is: it only takes three steps to build your traffic through blog commenting. Here’s the proof, from my own experience implementing this commenting strategy:

The traffic my comments generated

These aren’t the best comments I’ve made—they’re just the results from the most recent comments I’ve made. 19 high quality visitors stayed on for an average of four minutes. This was my comment, “I'm not much of a JavaScript programmer, but using JavaScript on the client side rather than on the server side seems better to me.” That one tiny sentence brought me 19 visitors.

Are you commenting on blogs? Do you have a commenting strategy you’d like to share with us?

Joe is web designer/developer. He enjoys programming with HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, and MySQL. On the side, Joe blogs about programming, SEO, traffic and conversions at Web Programming 360. Follow him on Twitter at @WebProgramming1.

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