This guest post is by Joe of Samuel 17.
When I first started my blog, about two months ago, I had a hard time getting five visitors a day. I got so tired of doing so much work to end up being a nobody on the side of the highway. One lucky day, I decided to convert all of the popular blogs traffic to my little blog.
Why and how? Well, readers of the popular blogs are high converters and very targeted to my blog. More than likely, they will stay on my blog for more than five minutes. Chances are that my content, which I work so hard to produce, will finally pay off into thousands of subscribers!
There are two different ways to get traffic from those A+ blogs. While one is more valuable than the other, the other is easy and fast. First is guest posting. Yes: guest posting. But have no fear! The next source of blog traffic is blog commenting.
Blog commenting is so easy, even leaving a sentence can supply you with an excellent 50 unique visitors. Then possibly another ten subscribers will come out of that group, since it’s so targeted. What are the steps for driving traffic through commenting on other blogs?
1. Find popular, targeted blogs
Before commenting, you need to know exactly where to comment. If your blog’s about dog training and you comment on Web Designers Ledger, you should know the amount of traffic will be little and the SEO gain may be zero. The most important thing in blog commenting is the blog you comment on. If you get that wrong, then your whole comment traffic strategy collapses.
Let’s find the blogs you want to comment on. This is really easy. What’s your niche? For example, if I was trying to find blogs for Darren at ProBlogger to comment on, I’d Google “blogging blogs.” He’s in the blogging niche and we’re looking for blogs. Combine that to get “blogging blogs.”
Searching for blogging blogs
The first result actually gives us a huge list of the top 25 blogging blogs. You can comment on every single one of those blogs every day to receive an extra hundred—or possibly thousand—visitors a day.
But wait! How will you know when they update those blogs? You may not want to be constantly checking 25 blogs every day. That’s a time- and work-waster.
2. Receive blog updates automatically
RSS is a life-saver here. RSS, Really Simple Syndication, gives you instant updates for any blog whenever they occur. To start using RSS you need an RSS reader. I prefer Google Reader as it seems to be fast efficient and checks for new listings in the RSS feeds constantly. My Google Reader is a great example…
Google Reader
I am subscribed to eleven blogs that are updated around once a day. What do I like best about Google Reader? The related RSS feature gives you RSS feeds similar to the current RSS feeds your subscribed to. If I looked under Recommended Items, I would find a bunch of related blogs to comment on. I think that’s really helpful when you have trouble finding popular blogs related to yours—finding one and adding it to Google Reader will give you other similar blogs to comment on.
3. Consider quality and placement
I hope you’ve realized that in order to drive traffic to your blog through commenting, your comment needs to be in the top five or three comments. Being first counts more than you think. It’s just like Google: you’re trying to rank #1, #2, or #3.
Sometimes in order to complete a tough task like that, you might think you’ll need to rush through the article and just say something random. Wrong! Don’t ever do that. It will be obvious that all you’re trying to do is get traffic. Being third is better than being first if your comment makes relevant sense and provides a valuable bonus for the readers.
One other thing: always read the article. If you don’t read it, you won’t be able to comment with relevance and insight. Headlines may be misleading so always read the article.
What about replies? Some blogs allow you to reply to other comments. If you were too late and there have already been 20 comments on a post, why not reply to the first comment to get an awesome position, plus a great quality comment? Replies are only helpful when the quality of the comment is super-high, though. It must be an actual reply to the first comment, not just a comment for the sake of commenting. While it doesn’t have to be long, your comment should contain very valuable information.
4. What fourth step?
That’s how easy commenting is: it only takes three steps to build your traffic through blog commenting. Here’s the proof, from my own experience implementing this commenting strategy:
The traffic my comments generated
These aren’t the best comments I’ve made—they’re just the results from the most recent comments I’ve made. 19 high quality visitors stayed on for an average of four minutes. This was my comment, “I’m not much of a JavaScript programmer, but using JavaScript on the client side rather than on the server side seems better to me.” That one tiny sentence brought me 19 visitors.
Are you commenting on blogs? Do you have a commenting strategy you’d like to share with us?
Joe is a college student studying business at the University of Georgia. He started Samuel 17, a social media marketing agency designed to help small businesses conquer the Goliath of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Snapchat. If you need help with social media, check out Samuel 17.
This is a great post. Blog commenting has worked well for me. One blog in particular is one of my top referral sites and all I do is leave a comment to her posts. The audience is a perfect match and seems to drive traffic my way.
I would add that if the site has CommentLuv, you have an opportunity to choose from one of your last ten posts to include with your blog name. This gives the reader of the comment an opportunity to click through to whatever post you have chosen to share. Catchy titles help a tremendous amount with CommentLuv.
Using an intriguing name (like this one) is another way to draw a few extra clicks… ;)
Commenting also on blogs within my niche that are about people seeking advice or diary style blogs where the author shares about their healthy lifestyle journey is one way that always gets people to visit my blog.
Commentluv also helps a lot. Because i get to leave link to a post related to the blog I just read.
Following the advice of the guest poster, here I go. The only problem is that if you live in a vastly different time zone from the blog’s time zone, you’re always going to miss the boat. Unless you’re stalking all your favorite blogs day and night.
Also, following the reply-to-the-first-comment will result in something I’m doing now: it has nothing to do with the comment, it’s there just for exposure and rankings.
You know, “if it can be abused, it will”.
It has worked for me as well. I agree with you
That’s all there is to it, just leave a valuable comment and you’ll get some traffic. This is how I started out my blog and if I ever make anymore sites, this will be the preferred starting method.
I totally agree about CommentLuv. I’ve noticed since adding CommentLuv to my site, it’s drawn lots more comments – so it’s a win-win. You get more comments and people get to promote their posts.
I do like to comment on blogs but there are a few issues that I’ve found with it, the main one being that you don’t get to much traffic from them. I think the traffic estimates stated in this post are overated but then again I have never tried to customize my comments to get more traffic. I simply comment what I think about the article. Perhaps I should think more about what I’m writing!
John, I thought the same thing when I started blogging. But what I realized was I wasn’t blog commenting enough. I read somewhere – I think from Yaro’s blog that he left comments on at least 10 blogs a day (at the beginning). When I first read that – I was amazed- because I didn’t have that type of time to commit to blog commenting. So what I did- was hire a virtual assistant to do the blog commenting for me. (some may think this is cheating- I just call it saving time and allowing my efforts to be on other things). I’ve seen growth in my blog traffic, comments and subscribers. So I strongly believe that blog commenting is worth it.
Alease
Thanks Joe, Comments must have some value to readers, it is fun to see people interacting with each other on a topic. John quality is the name of the game, similar to Yahoo answers, you can obtain a fair amount of traction just leaving answers to questions posted in your niche. Joe, never thought of the technical comments, we all pick up information when researching and other than in the odd forum I have never left a comment on technical, so thanks for a good idea.
I have started to comment a lot more on blogs as a way of bringing in new subscribers.
Great guest post!
Joe,
What a great timing of this post.
I made my first comment yesterday on copyblogger.com I never commented on any blog before
Day before yesterday I was thinking while reading a blog post, that if I could manage to comment first on any of the highly trafficked blogs, I could get visibility and ultimately traffic.
Luckily, I stumbled upon an article on copyblogger which was just published and there was no comment on it and on top of that it was related to my niche.
It was not planned at all
What better I could ask, I manage to get a first place and my comment was also appreciated by four people.
Great isn’t?
When there is a will there is a way.
Good luck to all , Happy commenting.
How can I resist commenting on this one? If “I’m not much of a JavaScript programmer, but using JavaScript on the client side rather than on the server side seems better to me” brought you 19 visitors, imagine the landslide of visitors this comment will generate for me. ;-)
I have to admit, I am surprised that a comment with so little depth would draw people over. I would assume that a comment that says something meaningful, but leaves the reader hungry for more (hints at more information) would be most successful.
Joe,
A well written and simple strategy to follow. I use blog search and RSS to be my main sources of blog commenting as you have mentioned. My second source is Twitter. I closely monitor the links posted by people who I follow (I only follow a very tight number of people who tweet quality content). Whenever I find an interesting post, I leave a comment.
Cheers,
Jane.
Great post, for me it’s all part of the marketing mix. From my website I’ve combined YouTube traffic with guest posting on popular blogs. This has built my website to page rank 5 status. As for sustained traffic, you have to keep pushing your best content to people and encourage them to share it.
Thanks for your tips,
David Edwards
Awesome stuff. Just added this to my commenting plan. thanks for sharing.
Joe,
Great post!
I have found blog commenting to be one of the biggest and best ways to drive traffic. Specifically for “newer” blogs. As you gain, “some” traction it doesn’t scale, but still a wonderful way to drive traffic and some great hints you gave.
If the main reason that you are commenting is to drive traffic back to your own site, then you are missing the point of blogging: authenticity.
Your blog’s content – hence, your comments to other people’s blogs – need to be authentic statements of what you know and how you feel about a topic that you have a unique perspective on, perhaps through a combination of passion, expertise, and talent.
There’s nothing wrong with targeting your writing – and comments – for traffic as long as your main purpose and message is authentic. If you gain more traffic (hence revenue) in doing so, more power to you … although, I choose the ‘no revenue’ path for my own blog to stop any such conflicts between revenue and content.
I started targeting blogs to monitor in my niche about a month ago but I tended to overlook checking Google Reader and got behind. In looking for a solution, I found an easier way by consolidating and filtering the RSS feeds and have ’em sent to my email where they were less likely to be overlooked. So far it works like a champ. If you want to see how I did it, I have an article on gathering intelligence on my blog.
Blog commenting is a great way to generate that extra traffic for you business, I haven’t come accords anyone that it doesn’t work for, it works for all – great stuff.
I guess the key is writing relevant comment that would be of value.
Google Reader is definitely the way to go when it comes to organizing blogs to comment upon – I have mine organized by topic so I can comment on one subject at a time. Helps me get into the zone!
You are right Kristi, Google reader is great for organizing blogs
After my commenting spree and detailed logging of last September (which ended with my posting of “How I got more than 4500 visits through blog commenting”), I started to use a stumble-like approach: wrote a script that chooses from my list of “commentable blogs” to visit and have a look for what they have anew/comment. If I find the blog worth a subscription, I move it to my RSS feed (but don’t remove from my commenting pool), if not I read it less often but often enough to catch the best/trendy things to comment.
Cheers,
Ruben
The comments has to be relevant to the topic, gives a solution or answer the questions from the readers, an experience or a reply to the other comment. You are participating in a group discussion or participating a community where your words can be seen by thousands of readers. So be careful, be creative, be thoughtful and helpful with other readers even if your thinking is completely different from others. People will judge you by reading your comments. If they found your comment sounds professional they will most likely visit your blog. Anyway thank you for all the tips and tricks to drive traffic thru comments.
Excellent advice. Bad commenting practice can destroy a blog. People are becoming very internet literate and can now instinctively work out who is commenting to move a discussion on and who is commenting purely for the backlink and odd click click through.
I am surprised that so many here are so gung ho about supporting actions that are little more than spamming.
It is also my understanding that the practice is now past its sell by date and the Google are placing less value on comment backlinks as time goes on, even if the links are do follow. Of course I only have anecdotal evidence for this.
I suspect that a quick straw poll of blogging and SEO experts on the subject will reveal this to be bad policy and will recommend a more organic process of commenting if you genuinely have something to add to the debate and moving on if you don’t. A genuine comment deserves the link and will get more visitors – win/win.
Hi! I love this! Commenting on more blogs is something that I am trying to do more of, however, I often find myself falling short when my comment is responded to. Subscribing to the entire comment feed of a post can sometimes destroy my inbox, making me even less likely to check in and see what was said. How to avoid this?
PS. Feel free to email me your response :)
Great job on the guest post. I’m sure it will create more visitors ;) I have heard of google reader and RSS of course but I can never seem to keep track and keep organized. Maybe I’ll try it again because I’ve started my THIRD blog and have a new niche.. Problogger isn’t really in my niche, but it’s a popular blog. So maybe being third or fourth commenter will help anyway.
I also have not experienced much traffic gain from commenting on blogs that your numbers provide (my biggest is probably around 9 in the Art of Nonconformity Bog) but I don’t try to optimize my comments for traffic either. I just comment, in general, when I know I want to get my blog out there. Sneaky trick about the reply tip.. never thought of that.
besides gaining the visitors does commenting help, in any way, in SEO of the site ??
I have been trying to do a lot more commenting but here’s my problem. My nitch is Crohn’s disease, and there aren’t a whole lot of blogs about it, and the ones out there often don’t provide a way to link back to your site. Do you have any suggestions to get around that besides find a better blog to comment on?
Hey Tim,
Honestly you can spread out your niche. Other diseases can still bring you valuable traffic. So maybe try to find a blog about a different disease and start there. Hey, my blogs about programming and I published this post about blogging. While those two different niches don’t necessarily fit together, they still relate to each other.
If you do a google search for comments chrons disease, you will find loads of sites and articles that allow commenting. Hope this helps :-)
Thanks so much for sharing this great information!!!
This is not only good for newbies, but experienced bloggers looking for more backlinks to their site!
I never thought of using the RSS reader to identify the blogs to comment on. I’ll have to get more involved in that area. I primarly check a few sites a day and comment on the article. Usually the articles are pretty good. I use Facebook to see what new blog shows up.
I’ve seen some bloggers where they post their blog name but not sure if that’s really the honest way to do things. But if it works for them, go at it.
Much of this information is common sense. It just takes for it to be put out there in written form for bloggers (including myself) to actually put this knowledge into action. Thanks for laying this out step by step!
Yes I agree blog commenting is great but one has to be sure to add value to the original post or the commenting will backfire.
I got a great takeaway from your post here, Joe. Much appreciated. I belong to a tribe that is dedicated to syndication and commenting. I’ve wondered whether or not it was a productive use of my time since it takes several hours (or more) per week. The blogs aren’t necessarily in my niche, which is why I wondered about it. My “gut” has been telling me to move on and I think I will after reading this. Thanks!
Hi Joe,
I logged my commenting strategy during 2 months (counting how many visits I got from each comment biweekly) and ended writing How I Got More Than 4500 Visits Through Blog Commenting (and yes, I did have that many in just two months). I’ve been meaning to offer a guest post to Darren about blog commenting vs guest posting for a long while… Work didn’t let me (yet). Maybe I should do it soon!
Cheers,
Ruben
Good points.
I definitely believe, from a strategical marketing standpoint, that blog commenting is a great way to get laser targeted visitors, especially if you’re transferring your exact writing style (the one you use on your blog) through to your comments. How else would you do it?
Yep, good post.
Guest posting helps us to get more traffic from A+ sites when compared to that of the commenting procedure.
Guest posting will always have the complete scope to present our mind on the topic whereas commenting we do have some limitations.
And People first read the post then they might read comments if they need some more stuff on the particular topic, so if the guest post is so impressive people won’t go to the comments.
This may be true, but another way that commenting regularly on a blog helps is to get the blog author familiar with you and the value you add to their posts. This will make it much easier to pitch a guest post to them, rather than a person they have never heard from before requesting a guest post. This has been my experience and has helped me to not only get good referring traffic, but to be granted guest posts as well.
Bernice
I don’t really have a strategy but I regularly comment on a high number of blogs, and have created a good following because of that. It really does work. The power of blog commenting is greatly underestimated, I feel. I am now exploring other methods of improving my traffic and guest posting is one of those. Of course I wil continue to post comments on numerous blogs too as I enjoy blog hopping and learn so much while I am doing it!
Enjoy the journey.
Mandy
Brilliant idea, I never thought to look for target blogs!!! Incredible I know!!! I really only comment on the blogs that I love but I really love them and I think it works because I want their blogs to succeed as much as I want mine too, it is in my best interests that the blogs I love keep on being fabulous and keep on producing great stuff for me to read!!! That being said, I put a whole lot of effort into commenting, I enjoy it and I get a lot of traffic back because of it. I find that on my blog I am more aware of what I write – my mother reads it after all, I am far more myself when I comment… My “commenting life” is literally another blog. I am a firm believer in strategic commenting and I have posted on it here: http://www.se7en.org.za/2011/03/10/se7en-strategic-commenting-tips-to-grow-your-blog
Clearly, I’m not even close to the top 3 comments, but I did want to say thank you for taking the time to share your experience with blog comments. I’m definitely going to use your suggestions.
What tool you are using in step #4 ?
Great post, for me it’s all part of the marketing mix. From my website I’ve combined YouTube traffic with guest posting on popular blogs. This has built my website to page rank 5 status. As for sustained traffic, you have to keep pushing your best content to people and encourage them to share it.
Thanks for your tips,
I was going to reply to naked girl in a dress’ comment but thought that would be so obvious.
My blog network, The Blogstress Network, has quite a discussion going on about commenting. I learned early on how important it is. I believe it has to be relevant and a good match to your blog and if that falls into place you are on the right path.
Thanks for sharing this, I will do the same.
b
I agree! Indeed it helps to be among the first to comment. It’s one of my guilty pleasures to look at those first comments to see if they’re from people who just want traffic. Those are usually very easy to spot. Somehow I love to read them and usually I’ll also visit the site from the commenter itself, which is nine out of ten times a very ugly blog. Love it! Haha! Anyone else crazy like this?
Thanks for posting this. I definitely think the trick is in what you say AND where you say it!
Yeah, I really like the idea of “threaded” comments. It really helps interaction back-and-forth with the readers and makes it feel a bit more open. We just added it to our new site and are interested to see how it works out.
Joe,
I bookmark all of the blogs that I regularly comment on. Ones that have CommentLuv are at the top of my list. I subscribe to rss feeds of blogs that do not post everyday but maybe two or three times a week.
I also find other blogs to comment on by clicking the url of commenters.
Well you’re quite right, and many do say so that blog commenting is a strategy for generating more traffic towards your web page. I really thank you for your advice and I will start to try this out and watch it closely how it works on real time.
I think as you pursue your goals this post. Comments are also useful for the one whose comment on the site – it’s a significant increase in fresh unique content for the site. Am I right?
Most of the blogs I love don’t allow commenting! :(
Blog commenting has been effective for my new first time blog. Because my posting frequency is around once per week I try not to make repeated comments on a site if I don’t have new posts. In addition to having readers see me as a trusted member of their community I want them to be rewarded with new content if they click through to my site.
One thing that worries me is the sustainability of this approach – it’s clicks for effort. Is this really the right way for me to build traffic for my blog? I have this nagging concern that if I keep writing new posts and keep making comments on other peoples blogs my readership isn’t really going to grow. Maybe I would be better investing my time in pillar content, guest posting and article submissions instead.
When I first started my blog last July, I use to get comments daily for while. Now I don’t get squat. I had posted 3 days in a row and still nothing. Why is it on my feeder reader I get bots daily? For example yesterday I had so called 11 subscribers, then today it went to 7. I only have 2 real subscribers. Is there a setting to fix this? Sorry I shouldn’t put this question on here, but google’s question section on reader no one ever answers. TY
Yes, that is an excellent strategy for building some high quality traffic to your blog. The only thing that can screw you chances of being the first comment on a blog is if the admin posts someones comment before yours.
Other than that i think im going to take this strategy, and run with it Joe!
I’ve added networkedblogs application to my facebook account which delivers the summary posts from the blogs I’ve subscribed through that application. This is an excellent application that syndicates all the post summary in one place and enable us to decide which one needs a comment.
It was a great strategy. Commenting on huge blogs gives you traffic as well as SEO. I commented on many big blogs of my niche and I got traffic,but not as much as you said. Still I am trying to find the technique in it.
It has been interesting to see commenting about commenting become an increasing topic of discussion on blog sites over the past few months. It’s great to see people exploring the boundaries of commenting, and commenting on this.
It is a fascinating activity building a comment network in a particular topic area. For example, I enjoy the posts on Problogger but when I click on (most) comment links the blog site that appears is aimed at trying to sell me something. People from these sites may click on my link (say from this comment) and will find a series of blogs that are, probably, just not interesting to them (they won’t suggest ways to make more money!). But occasionally there is a “match” – I like a blog, and they appear to like mine. For me the real measure of successful commenting is an increase in the number of these matches over time. Then you know you are part of a “real” blog network!
Commenting has been one of the best ways for me to get new visitors…except I comment on all types of blogs…since I write a food blog…and everybody needs to eat…the tip about replying to a post to give you a better comment position…Great tip!
Interesting strategy, I too noticed that when I comment more on bigger blogs there is an increase to my site.
My blog was launched back in November 2010. I had a personal blog prior and carried over some readership from there. Most of my readers comes from commenting, twitter, or facebook, with an occasional guest post thrown in. I have built a good solid list in Reader that helps me to catch posts when they are first published so that I can try to be the first or at least early in the commentors.
I would say that commenting is not a magic bullet, but it is definitely a big part of the growth strategy. It has also allowed me to form some friendships and collaborations with other bloggers as well.
Bernice
Will take a look at Google Reader
i recently started my blog don’t know how to increase traffic, thanks for the tips