As a blogger, I have no fondness whatsoever for comment spam. But I do love to comment on other blogs, and the earlier the better. Today I’m sharing a free tool that makes it easier to be one of the early comments on your favorite blogs.

It’s called Comment Sniper, and it was created by Duncan Carver. He creates some pretty useful and sometimes free software.

The software is pretty easy to use, although if the blogs you like use something other than Blogger or Wordpress software you may have to do a bit of work to figure out how the feed is formatted to get Comment Sniper to work. Here’s a screenshot of the software’s main screen:

You subscribe to blogs by filling out the following form with information about the location of the blog, its feed and the format of the feed. It knows how Blogger and Wordpress feeds are formatted, and this works for many blogs.

One of the best parts is that you can decide how often you want it to check feeds for new entries. I don’t check as often as some might, just every half hour. The initial setting was more frequent than that.

A trick to remember is that you can only change things if you stop Comment Sniper, and then you have to click the Start button on the Sniper Process screen again. You also only ever want to minimize it. Click the red X and it shuts down rather than going back down into the tray of the taskbar as some programs do. My first week or so it gave me a bit of trouble remembering that part.

If you decide to use this software, a key thing to remember is that you need to make quality comments. Being first is not nearly as important as saying something interesting enough to make people want to visit your website.

Be informative. Bring up additional points. Talk about your experience relating to the post. Keep it interesting.

Technorati Tags: comment sniper, blog comments, commenting