Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is one website promotion strategy that is pretty easy and, while leaving comments on blogs doesn’t take a lot of time, finding the blogs which are related to your niche and have posts that allow comments can be very time consuming.

While most people comment on blogs for the backlinks, you can also get traffic from it. The key, of course, is to make intelligent and informative comments that add to the post and the discussion. If you go around blasting in comments that just say “nice post” or “I agree” then you are probably going to find that you get a lot of your comments deleted.

If you are blog commenting with getting back links as your goal, then you will want to focus mainly on blogs that are “dofollow”. If you don’t know what this means – check out my ramblings on dofollow and nofollow.

But don’t think of leaving comments on blogs as something to do just for backlinks, it can also bring new readers to your blog. In fact, if you really make an effort to add to the discussion and inform in your comments, you might be surprised at how many new visitors that gains you.

Finding The Blogs

Like I said, finding the blogs can be problematic. First of all, you want to find a blog or at least a post that is related to your niche. Second of all, it has to be a blog or a post that accepts (and is still open for) comments. So, how do you find them?

One way is to search the web. You can go to http://blogsearch.google.com and type in your niche for a list of related blogs or go over to ask.com and type in your niche and check out the feeds list on the right, or check out http://www.blogcatalog.com. Any of the rss directories should be able to provide you with a list of rss feeds where you can find blogs in your niche.

If you are looking for only “dofollow” blogs you can try these sites:
http://www.dofollowblogs.com
http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver

If you are interested in seeing at a glance whether or not the blog is dofollow or nofollow as well as the PR of both the blog and the post page, then the tool I like to use is Fast Blog Finder. It’s super easy to use – you just type in your keyword phrase and it goes out and finds all the posts on the web that have that phrase, then you can sort by PR, nofollow tag etc… You can easily find a ton of blogs to comment on in minutes.

Below is a video of how easy this tool is – you can download the Free version of this tool here Or find out more about the full version (I think it costs around $49) by clicking here.

Blog Commenting Strategy

There are different methods used for leaving comments on blogs. Some people like to comment on the same blogs over and over (this has advantages on blogs that have the top commenters plugin – more on that later) while others like to find random blogs to comment on once and then move on.

I think your overall strategy really depends on how many niches you are using blog commenting for. If you have hundreds of small niche sites like I do, then you won’t have time to follow the top blogs in the niche and spend hours commenting every day. In this case, it’s probably better to use commenting on blogs as just one little part of your website promotion strategy – maybe take an hour or two once a week and work on some comments.

On the other hand, if you only have a handful of blogs that you are really trying to develop a presence for, you might want to keep a list of your favorite blogs and comment on them regularly. Keeping this organized can be a challenge, but there is a tool called comment sniper that you can help.

The key is to identify those blogs that are important in your niche, then you can set them up in the tool and it will notify you when a new post is make on these blogs so you can go in and be one of the first to comment. Being one of the first comments on a post has a slight advantage because a lot of people get bored half way down the comments so if you can get in in the beginning, there is a higher chance that your comment will be seen. You can download the free version of comment sniper here. Using this tool can also help you take advantage of blogs that have the Top Commenters plugin.

Top Commenters and Comment Luv Plugins

When you are leaving comments on blogs, you want to get the most bang for the buck and while finding blogs with dofollow links are great, there are a couple of other things you should look for too – and those are:

Top Commenter Plugin
This is a plugin that people can put on their blogs which automatically shows a list of the most frequent commenters. So, if you find a high traffic blog in your niche that has this plugin and systematically leave comments on it, you will get an extra benefit from being listed in the top commenters list which is typically shown on the sidebar of every page on the blog – so you get a sitewide link back to your website! I think this link is usually dofollow even if the comment links are nofollow. You can tell if a blog has this plugin by searching the sidebar for a top commenters section.

Of course, you have to be one of the people that adds the most comments (only good quality relevant ones that add to the discussion, please) and the comment sniper tool can help you with this by letting you know every time there is something new to comment on.

Comment Luv Plugin
This plugin will show a titled link to the commentors last blog post. So, if you comment on blogs that have this plugin, not only will you get your comment on the blog post but you will also get a link to your latest blog post (with the title as anchor text)! You can tell if a blog has this by looking at the comments and seeing if the other commenter’s have a link to their latest blog post after their comment.

Commenting

OK, so I’ve rambled on for quite a bit now and haven’t actually talked about the actual “blog commenting” process itself.

First of all, I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but I want to reiterate that you should only leave comments that add to the discussion and are informative. Doing so will make other people reading the blog want to click through to your site and will gain you traffic as well as insure that the blog owner actually keeps your comment up. Leaving crappy “Me too” comments will not do anything to elevate your authority status and will probably get your comment deleted. Even if it doesn’t get deleted, you probably won’t get any traffic from it. OK, enough said about that – now onto the process of actually commenting on the blog.

When you find a post to comment on, you will see something that looks sort of like this underneath the post:

This is where you leave your comment. I think the fields are self explanatory, but there are some important things to note:

The Name Field

This will be the anchor text and the URL will be the URL you put in the Website field. Your first inclination is to put your keyword in this field so you can get it in the anchor text of your back link, however not all blogs allow this. In fact, it is considered spammy by a lot of webmasters so what you need to do is check out the blog and see if other people were allowed to post with a keyword phrase – if so then go ahead but if you see all the comments have first names, then use your name or you risk your comment getting deleted.

Email Address Field

Obviously you want to put your email address here – I usually make it match with the website in the website field but I’m not sure if anyone care about that.

Website

This is where you want to link back to – it could be your main URL or an inner page.

The Comment

I’m not going to harp on the importance of making a useful intelligent comment. The thing to look for here is if html is allowed – some blogs let you put URLs in the comments field so it’s an extra chance for you to get a link to your site. Of course, you want to link to a page that is relevant to the discussion!

Posting Your Comment

Once you are done, just hit the submit button. Some blogs show the comment right away, but some manually approve them so you may or may not see your comment right away. You’ll get a message if it needs to be approved and then you can just check back at a later date to see if your comment made it on.

So, that’s all there is to leaving comments on blogs! All the things I’ve shown you above can be done for free, but if you value your time you might want to invest in a few tools – here’s some of the tools (both free and paid) that I use to help with the blog commenting task:

http://www.dofollowblogs.com
http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver
Free Version Of Fast Blog Finder
Free Version Of Comment Sniper