Free Traffic From Blog Comments

Blogging is very effective in building a community for your site, and if you can obtain plenty of one way backlinks to your site from other blogs, you will build your community and get yourself a lot of free targeted traffic.

Always treat another person’s blog the way you would wish others to treat yours. Don’t add unrelated comments just for the sole purpose of getting the backlink. This will be seen as spamming. You want to add value and interest in your comment, and intrigue readers enough to want to want to click through to your site.

The link you get through to your site will be a ‘no follow’ link in most cases, so the search engine robots won’t connect the two sites, meaning the link won’t have any direct SEO properties.

So you do want it to be clicked, or else it will have no purpose. And you then want those extra visitors to convert at your normal rate, so the more relevant your comment is to the blog the better.

Most blog comments allow a link to your site within your name. But some bloggers will allow comments to contain a contextual link within the text as well. Always make sure you can see other examples of this on the same blog before you attempt to do it.

Many people have their settings to moderate their comments before they are published (as you should, to minimize spam), but you won’t know this until you attempt to post. Don’t take the chance of including a contextual link, as even if your comment is relevant, the blog owner might choose to block all your comments from then on.

Spend a few minutes finding the most suitable blogs to post comments on. The more popular they are, the more traffic you will get. So look for high ranking blogs first, then look for relevancy to your niche. You might think you have found the perfect blog when you see it is highly relevant to your niche, and yet they are not a competitor. But you could waste your time if this blog is hardly getting any visitors.

The way to find popular blogs is to type your niche into a search engine and add the word blog to your search. Or search within a blog directory such as Technorati. The list of blogs that show up first are a combination of the most popular and the most relevant. Make sure you check the popularity of the blog. The simplest way is really to see how many comments the posts are getting. If the blog is popular there will be a lot of comments - simple as that. You could also check the page rank (PR) on Alexa.com. The higher the number the better the more visitors the site gets.

Once you have found suitable blogs to comment on, try to be first to leave a comment. This will then be seen first after the post. So you will probably need to follow the site’s RSS feed, so you can stay up to date. Then you can be alerted as soon as the blog is updated. Although your comment might add to the discussion, it will not be effective for lots of backlinks if it is not near the top, as people don’t have time to read all the comments.

Having said that, if you wish to post several times on a particular blog and establish a rapport with the community there, try to answer people’s questions if you can. This will add value to the discussion and you will build up trust.

Once you have a lot of sites you might want to outsource the blog commenting. It can be time consuming, but anything that gets you free targeted traffic is definitely worth doing, so don’t ignore this powerful way of getting one way backlinks to your site.

by Paula - Engineer Your Success - April 2009
 

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