In this post Lisa Newton from Travelin’ Local shares the story of how leaving a comment on a blog increased traffic back to her blog 975% in a day.
It’s a well-known fact that commenting on other people’s blogs helps drive traffic to your own blog. I knew this, but until today, I had never seen its real results. Harnessing the action ability has led individual blog owners to comment back, which happened to me several times, like here, here, and here.
But, this time it was different:
To begin with I received a new digital camera for Christmas.
Now not knowing too much about digital photography, I went searching the experts over the Internet.
One of the first places I landed was at the Digital Photography School.
I immediately fell in love with the site and instantly subscribed to their RSS feed.
Low and behold, the other day, just as I was browsing my Google Reader, a new post from DPS popped up, What is Your Favorite Landscape Location?.
I just had to comment, and like most California girls, my favorite place to shoot pictures is at the beach.
Now, I know I’d hit it lucky because my comment was only the second one on the list. The prevailing theory is that the closer your comment is to being first, the more hits it will get.
Because my blog is only a month old, I usually don’t get much traffic, on average about 15 -20 hits per day. But on the day I made the comment, I got 195 hits, an increase of over 975%, with almost all of it coming via the Digital
Photography School. Recently Darren over at Problogger reported getting his single largest day of hits on DPS to the tune of 250,000 hits. Although 195 isn’t even close to 250,000, but I’ll bet the increased percentage on Travelin’ Local was higher.
All from that one comment.
On another bright spot, dgwphotography left the following comment on this blog post’s featured photo at Flickr:
“This is beautiful – I saw this from your reply on the Digital Photography School blog.
I love the deep depth of field here…”
The power of comments is truly inspirational; when translated into action.
Do you leave valuable comments? Have you ever had a comment experience like this?
Note from Darren: thanks to Lisa for this post. As Lisa says – 195 hits from a comment might not seem like a lot – but for a blog starting out it is a great way to grow traffic. Of course the danger in leaving comments as a way to drive traffic is that some bloggers fall into the trap of getting ‘spammy’. To help you avoid this I’ve previously written a post titled 11 Tips for Getting Your Comments Noticed on a Popular Blog. I hope it helps!
The only thing I have to say about this is, don’t comment spam.
Say something worth the time you took to type it.
I delete comment spam from my blog all the time. As an experienced blogger, I know the difference.
I have found commenting on blogs like this one also help with my page ranking on Google. It’s a great way to get you name out there and build a strong network.
Basically what is a blog. A form of knowledge sharing. Sharing needs more than 1 person. Imagine someone who has no traffic to his site but keeps writing & reading his own blogs for indefinite period of time. How useless it can be? So comments are the source of encouragement to keep going.
This is a unique way to look at leaving comments on others blogs. I have to admit I never thought of it in this way. I will have to try this to see how it works for my blog. Thank you for the great tip!
Daren I always wonder how you make this blog so good
I apologize for my out of sync comments. I was thinking about my post, hence lost the context & accidentally hit the submit button without proof-reading.
Hi,
This is a very inspirational post. I have commented on blogs on and off over the course of time. To be honest, I originally wanted to get traffic and backlinks from my commenting, but I have found that it is actually a really fun and engaging thing to do.
I feel like I am connected to the blogging community when I comment.
My next read will be your “11 tips for getting your comments noticed on a popular blog”.
I also think it’s a great way to find the friends with whom you can build up your business. Actually, you get the best of both worlds.
Also, reading comments sometimes inspires me on writing some new post in my blog, because someone has said something that has led me toward a great idea.
Well I knew that comments are important and I have been emphasizing about this on my blog and I do comment on people’s blog but not too much and the only reason I do this is for back links but I didn’t realize that they can be such good source of traffic. I have been getting some traffic by commenting on problogger and after reading this post I am getting confident that only thing I will do is comment on people’s blogs.
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Mohammad Afaq
Free Website Traffic
I don’t leave comments for the sake of just leaving comments. I read and leave if i want to react to the post. here, i’d say thank you. hmm. as they say, commenting on other blogs must be one of the to-do list for any blogger.
What you say is very true even in non blog contexts! When you appreciate people, the person feels more inspired to perform better! An offshoot of this topic though! :)