This way of spreading the word about your website or project is recommended by many. Go search for authority blogs for your niche and post comments there they say. Or go find a dofollow blog and post there so you’ll have a backlink to your site. In the end we have to be realistic and really think of how important blog comments are and also what are the benefits we can get from this.
Posting comments on others blogs is not that easy. First you’ll have to find authority blogs, then you have to read the articles they publish every day and after that you have to post your comment : which has to provide some value because otherwise becomes a spam comment that has many chances to be deleted. And even if it’s not deleted, a comment such as : “great article, keep it up” or “awesome tips” will get you zero benefits – guaranteed.
Why do we post on blogs ?
If someone says that he is posting on blogs to support the writer of that blog this is one big fat lie. In the Internet world “nobody cares for you – Seth Godin” and if you carefully think of it, this is true. We are used to get free information on the Internet – and we always want informations that concerns us, or informations that we can use. So, when we post a comment on a blog what we really want is to show everybody that we are interested in the subject. We want all to see that we know our niche market – we know the cool places where the elite hang out. Is like going out in a bar or in a club : you don’t go just to be there and to contribute with money to their profit : you go there to meet someone and have a great time (again we think of us).
This is the main reason we post comments : to be noticed by others or by the blog’s owner- and we also hope that a comment will get us traffic (from my own experience : I didn’t received traffic from my comments that would be worthy to mention here)
What comments offer us ?
The most important benefit you’ll get is exposure. If you are constant in posting constructive, quality comments on a blog people will start to notice. The thing you also need to take into consideration is that on authority blogs the number of comments can be pretty high. So if you are not fortunate enough to post among the first 5 then your comment will most likely get overlooked by other readers.
The second thing you can get from posting on other blogs is a backlink to your site. The problem is that if the blog has links with nofollow (easy to check with the SEO Toolbar from seobook.com) then you have zero chances in getting a backlink. The other problem is this : even if the blog is a dofollow, the quality of the backlink is really low. The reason for that is because Google knows that your backlink comes from a comment on a blog that was written by you – hence the low value of that link.
To comment or not to comment
Maybe you wonder if is really worth the effort to read all those articles everyday and post intelligent comments that in the end will not count in your rankings. Well … the answer really depends on what you are after : if you plan to improve your rankings then the answer is NO – use that time to get some valuable links. But if you just want to expose yourself to the world of Internet then this is a very good method to do it.
If your comments offer quality then maybe people that read it will follow you on Twitter or will visit your blog or maybe the blog’s owner will invite you to write a guest post and that is where the quality backlinks are.
What about you?
So, in the end I’d like to invite you to comment here bellow and tell me what you think. What do you expect to get from commenting on other people’s blogs ? I’d love to read your opinions and thoughts on this matter.
Networking: When I interact with other people online through twitter, I often follow up by actually visiting their site. I feel it’s both common courtesy and common sense to try and strengthen the minimal connection you might have witha person on twitter. By interacting with their site, as well as interacting with them through twitter it make it much more likely in the future, that person would think of you as a person, and not just an abstract idea. This is important for other bloggers, because it opens opportunities like guest posts, or shared resources.
Foot In Mouth’s last blog post..Fight Comment Spam at the Source
Believe it or not sometimes I comment on other peoples blogs just because I enjoy reading their articles and it isn’t part of some SEO strategy…
If you launch a new website or blog then you have to start somewhere. You are right in that they are low quality links but they are good places to start networking and if you do a few every week you’ll end of up some nice domain diversity.
I think that if blog commenting is still you main strategy one year after launch then you need to re-examine why your site hasn’t achieved greater success
Andy @ DoFollow 001’s last blog post..Review of Rishabh Sood’s Do-Follow Blog Search Engine
I stand in a river of information. Sometimes, it brings interesting-looking tidbits to me, so I go to them and read them in full. Sometimes again, I have something to say about the topic. And so I reply.
Not to get links, although I won’t hold back from providing them when requested. Not to build any reputation. Simply because I want to respond to something I read. Commenting is not a goal-driven activity for me and, I suspect, for most people who do so.
This is how I have used the internet since before terms like “SEO”, “blog”, or even “world-wide web” had been coined and it is still how I use it today.
Maybe page rank, maybe traffic, maybe nothing. Getting links from blogs is enormously time-consuming and mostly of little worth. Difficult to justify the time to clients, too, because how do they know you’ve done anything useful? Mostly, you probably haven’t anyway.
BB
i comment only if i feel i can add something of value, and i usually only go to sites where i want to create a relationship either with the author of the blog or the people reading the blog, which is mostly folks in the RE and mortgage worlds.
Tim’s last blog post..The Best Chicago Real Estate Blogs
Hey, cool tips. I’ll buy a glass of beer to the man from that forum who told me to go to your site