You like reading blogs in your domain or rather you have to, in order keep up with what is happening in the industry. You also like commenting on those blogs to express your opinion or to add to the conversation.
Let’s be honest here, most people comment on blogs either to get backlinks or to get some traffic. How much SEO can you achieve via commenting? How many visitors can you get? How far can you get by commenting? Is this really a scalable technique?
You are going to get nowhere; a fraction of people who visit a web page read the article and get to the comments section. A fraction of them will read your comment and a fraction of them (if any) will follow the link to your site. Also most blog comments links are ‘nofollow’ and carry very minimal SEO weight. There are really better ways to be spending your time then trying to get one passing visitor at a time.
So am I telling you to stop commenting on blogs?
No, in fact quite the opposite, I want to show you how powerful comments can be when used in the right way. How to make the time you have spent on reading the article and writing the comment count?
You can achieve much more though your comments on other blogs.
So, how do you achieve more with your comments?
The moment you ask yourself this question, you have an edge over tons of other bloggers, because you now have the key to a very powerful strategy, I call the comments strategy very few people follow this strategy so you get ahead really fast.
Develop a plan, no plans lead to no results
If you are commenting on other blogs without having a strategy, let me tell you what no one else is telling you, save your time!
Have a goal in mind when you are reading blogs in your domain and leaving comments. If you have no goals while leaving a comment, it is unlikely that you will achieve anything special with your comments.
So what kind of goals can you achieve with the help of the commenting strategy?
It really depends on what you would want to achieve with the blogger and the site you are commenting on.
Get a guest post
Select the blogs you want to get a guest writing opportunity on. Comment regularly on the most recent articles that are published. Your comments on other blogs are probably the first introduction you give to a successful blogger. So make your comments good and meaningful and add to the discussion on the site. Hopefully you will get a response from the blog owner to one of your comments. Take this opportunity to send them an email thanking them for the response and introduce yourself and also send a link to your blog. Continue to leave comments on their blog for a couple of days more and then send them an email requesting for a guest post opportunity. You have already provided proof that you can write in a thoughtful manner, it will be really hard for the blogger to turn you down. Now instead of getting a ‘nofollow’ link and a few visitors, you have an opportunity to get a ‘dofollow’ link and a chance to get readers from their site to your site through your guest post.
Become a staff writer
You can really turbo charge this strategy. By turbo charge I mean, keep commenting for a longer period, get more than one guest posts on the site and later check to see if you can get a staff writer gig with the site.
Build a long lasting relationship
You can build a long lasting relationship by being a regular commentator and offering to help the blogger on their initiatives. If you are also in the same domain, this will open up opportunities to partner on future initiatives which can lead to much more exposure for you and your blog. You can co-author courses, eBooks or get the blogger to promote a product you have developed.
So by just focusing and developing a plan, you can make comments work for you in a way very few people ever will because they will ignore the power of such a simple tool.
If commenting on a blog has helped you build a connection with a blogger, let us know how you did.
Like always, I reply to all your comments and questions.