One of the aspects of blogging that can be easy to ignore is commenting on other people’s blogs. Yet this is a great way to build links to your own site, even if they aren’t followed by the search engines, as well as build your reputation.
A good comment on a relevant blog is worth the effort. If you get a link out of it, so much the better, but you can make yourself appear knowledgeable too. Try to add something to the conversation - no me toos or great idea comments. No one is going to be impressed by those.
One of the things you want to do is find new blogs to comment on, as well as build a regular presence on your favorite blogs.
New blogs mean new people to click over to your site. You can find new blogs to check out by using Technorati, Stumble Upon, Digg and other social bookmarking and networking websites. Some of these won’t have a lot of readers, but even then you may attract the attention of the blog owner.
Commenting on some blogs regularly can build you something of a reputation. It won’t be the same as the blog owner’s, of course, but if you always have something relevant and interesting to say, people are more likely to want to see what you say on your own blog.
Try setting a goal for how many good comments you want to make daily or weekly. Do not allow yourself to fill your quota with junk, as such comments are of very limited value and may even be deleted by bloggers unwilling to leave poor quality comments up.
When you do get comments on your blog, try responding to them to encourage the conversation. You want to encourage people to keep coming back. I suggest allowing people to subscribe to your comments. You will probably want to adapt the code so that it sends an email compliant with CAN-SPAM.
Technorati Tags: blogs, blog commenting, comments
Thanks for mentioning my post on how to setup subscribe-to-comments.
In many ways it is one of the most important posts I have written on my blog, but very few people take notice, or take action.
In many ways it is more important to me than anything I have written to do with DoFollow
The redirecting email to use an SMTP server is also very important. I know lots of blogs where they receive comments and only a fraction of the subscribed comments get sent, and end up being discarded as “overflow” by the servers
Google has a great way to find new blogs that are relevant to your area of expertise. Just go to http://www.google.com/alerts and type in the keywords you are looking for, set it to look at blogs and send you the results once a day. It is a very useful tool that enables you to find blogs that have used your keywords recently. You just click on the link in your email to read and comment on the blog.
[...] I like to let people subscribe to my comments. I’ve discussed this in the past if you would like more information on it. Using that and the DoFollow plugin can help to make it more interesting for people to comment. [...]
[...] sit there. Answer them! You have to participate too. It also helps if you allow visitors to subscribe to the comments so that they can easily read responses in their email. They may or may not come back to read the [...]