Blog commenting is a really important marketing strategy online for small businesses. It can be an incredible way to build relationships with other industry bloggers and a amazing way to get super targeted traffic as long as you do it ‘right’. Ask yourself these 4 questions before leaving a comment somewhere online. Ditto with forums.
Comment Guidelines:
- Do I have anything intelligent to say?
- Is this blog relevant to my industry?
- Does this blog reach my potential audience?
- Does this blog get any traffic?
Try not to make your comments only a couple sentences. Write a solid response.
Track Important Blogs
You also may want to make sure you subscribe via RSS to high trafficed blogs in your industry and make sure you get pinged when they write a new post via email so you can zip over there and write a relevant comment ASAP end up as the first commenter.
Be First With Your Comments!
As they say, “The early bird gets the worm!” By being the first commenter it’s often the first comment listed under the post. Readers will see this comment and if you write something interesting or useful then many of their blog readers will click on your name in the comments going back to whatever url you left as your source. Some of my best traffic is from writing strong comments that add to conversation on other people’s blogs or forums.
Leverage The Search Engines With Your Blog Commenting
You may also want to search your top keywords and FAQ’s online and see what sites pop up in the first two pages. If there are web properties that are not yours listed and their content offers commenting then go in and make a comment. This way you are leveraging other people’s strong rankings in the SERP’s (search engine results pages). Don’t forget to do it for all 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, & Bing) as they list different results.
How do you use blog commenting as marketing tool?
After all that, I’m surprised no one commented!
This was a great post, Matthew. Short and sweet.
I might add another question, assuming you’ve found an influential blog you want to track:
4) How can I build a relationship with this blogger?
We don’t have the advantage quite often of meeting these bloggers in person, but we can develop relationships through the comments we leave. Are we respectful of their space? Do we address the blogger respectfully? Are we friendly? Do our comments add value to his or her blog? Can we do this periodically so the blogger gets to know us?
As relationships develop so do visits from that blogger to your blog, and along with them come their valuable comments which in turn increases the value of your blog. Moving beyond that also come possibilities for guest blogging and backlinks.
I might add though that when building relationships, I really don’t think about what I can get out of it. I think more of what WE can get out of it and what we together can provide the internet community. Keep that attitude and relationships will come easily.
Again, good stuff, Matthew. I just gave a class on SEO for bloggers and encouraged them to do some blog commenting. This was a perfect follow-up.
Hey Kathy, Thanks for stopping by. Great additional tips. I had some comments
but they were with a Facebook Comment plugin I used to use. I got rid of it. Even though it brought me tons of comments, they are owned by FB and as you can see even when you delete the plugin they are no longer on the site. I want my comments on my blog to always be there no matter what type of comment tool I use.
Thanks for sharing, such a useful article, From my point of view relevancy for blog commenting is most important because off topic comment has less chance for getting approval.