Drive Traffic with Commenting

DON”T SPAM!!!

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about driving traffic to your blog with commenting.

For those of you who don’t know commenting is what allows blogs to become interactive. Comments give readers a voice, an opinion, a sounding board. When you visit your favorite blogs you may notice the leave a comment or comment# section. If you haven’t clicked it, go ahead, it’ll link you to all the wonderful feedback people leave. Some good, some bad.

People leave comments for all types of reasons. To be heard, to refute what was written in the post, and also to promote themselves the their blogs (or sites). If you leave a comment on most blogs they’ll allow you to put your URL which will most likely enable your name as a link from your comment to that specific URL.

Presto, you have instant traffic from some top name blogs. Just a few clicks later and you might have a regular reader.

Commenting takes times so it’s not a quick fix to your traffic needs but it is a good way to promote yourself on some top notch blogs.

Some words to go by though:

1. Don’t comment just for the link, add something useful to the conversation or banter caused by the post or start a new conversation. I’m sure there are people who just sit and wait for a new post on big name blogs just to be the first in the list of comments, a prime spot for click-throughs.

2. Try not to link back to your blog in your comment. Unless you have a super useful post on your blog linking in your comment is a sure sign that you just want visitors and you may get blacklisted from a decent blog where you could have otherwise benefited later on when you do have something useful to say.

3. If you want to increase readership find blogs that are of similar content to yours and comment the most on those. A reader at a political blog isn’t likely to care what’s going on in the world of Death Metal.

4. Check for responses, if you post a comment and expect it to garner a response, check back from time to time and see what’s up. Readers are more likely to click if there was open dialog that was useful rather then stopped mid exchange.

Give it a try and check your stats. You’ll need to keep it up if you want to get big results but every little bit can help when you’re just starting out.