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12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 8: Comment With Abandon
One of the most consistent bits of advice that accomplished bloggers give to new bloggers and webmasters hungering for traffic is:
Actively leave comments on other people's blogs.
I don't delude myself that I am revealing earth-shattering new web traffic secrets here in the 12 Days. For one thing, if it was so secret you might not know or believe it works. Plus it is hard to keep a secret from everyone on the Internet. The real problem is separating fact from hype and identifying what is likely to work consistently. I am including this one because I have seen it work and, just as importantly, believe it is still one of the best techniques for building quality traffic.
For a similar opinion on the subject, check out this article by Yaro Starak at Entrepreneur's Journey: Proof That Blog Commenting Still Works To Build Traffic.
Commenting on other people's blogs is effective for building traffic, not only because it creates awareness in your blog, but also because it inspires genuine reciprocity in the other bloggers. When you show support for someone else's work, at some point they tend to feel compelled to return the favor or at the very least curious on what you are about. Plus, since bloggers are constantly looking for new things to blog about so they may start to think of your site as a good source of content. They will feel more comfortable referencing your content knowing it is a mutually beneficial situation. In summary, it's a win-win situation, which means that it's a sustainable process.
Before I forget, I want to point out that you don't need to have a blog site to use this technique. My picobuzz site is not primarily a blog, yet I fully intend to build relationships with bloggers. In fact, non-blog content provides new material for bloggers as an alternative to spending too much time commenting on each others blog posts.
The other aspect of commenting on other people's blogs is illustrated in this picture which shows a typical comment for an individual's blog:
In addition to leaving your name and comment, you are often allowed to provide your website's URL. Why? Because bloggers know you want to spread your URL love around, and also that you will be more motivated to contribute comments for that very reason. Getting your URL on several quality blogs will have a positive impact on your search engine placement.
Here's where things get challenging: although smaller blogs and sites will allow this sort of thing, larger blogs and sites do not because of the risk of abuse by spammers. As mentioned in my post 12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 7: The Digg Effect, Digg does not support this when commenting. The same is true for Reddit and about any other social networking site known for high traffic. So we are left with a bit of a dilemma: we want to comment on a site with good traffic but we also want to leave our URL.
To this, I offer a two-part solution:
1. Pick a couple or few blogs with the following characteristics:
- They cover topics in the same topic, interest or industry as your site.
- You respect and enjoy reading their content.
- They have respectable but not huge traffic. You are more likely to develop a good relationship if the bloggers are still small enough to be reachable.
- Oh yes, and they allow adding your URL in comments.
2. It is possible to find a site that has good readership but is not so "big" that URLS are banned. I recommend Mashable as a worthy site for supporting and commenting. I enjoy reading it, they have a cool site, and it allows URLs in comments. It also has a respectable Alexa ranking of about 1300 at this point.
You can sign up for Mashable here.
Happy commenting!
P.S. this blog allow urls in comments
