Before we take a dive into the world of blog commenting let’s start with a quote from Robert Greene:
“The world is dangerous with troves of enemies everywhere. Hence everyone has to protect themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more danger than it protects you from. It cuts you off from valuable information; it makes you conspicuous and an easy target. Better to circulate among people, find allies, mingle. You are shielded from your enemies by the crowd.”
The importance of this quote cannot be over-emphasized. The more you become a recluse deciding only to write the best of content without reaching out to others-the easier you dig your blogging grave.
Am sure you must have heard of the Pareto principles i.e the 80:20 rule in blogging relationship, it can be paraphrased as:
“Do your writing 20% of the time and promote it 80% of the time.”
When you do this you make yourself relevant in the scheme of things.
Why?
Human are social animals and as such crave
interaction.
Though there are different schools of thought on the Pareto principle, all agree that relationship building is important if you desire to have your blog move to the next level.
In short, promotion becomes difficult if you do not intend to build relationship with your audience.
Perhaps you know your audience is lurking somewhere, but an invisible barrier seems to have been erected between you and them.
You’ve heard of blog commenting but you’ve dismissed it as a strenuous exercise that will not yield any benefit.
If this is your take, then you’re wrong.
Before I fully dive into how to use commenting to build and cement relationship, I will need to outline some of the obvious as well as not so obvious benefit of blog commenting.
Benefit Of Blog Commenting
1. It lets you demonstrate your expertise, hence giving you that aura of authority.2. It provides you with SEO benefit especially if you drop your comment on comment luv enabled blogs.
3. It helps you build your audience especially when you provide valuable comments
4. It makes you develop close-knitted friends
Through blog commenting, Adrienne has met …. In real life; and not only that they’ve developed an awesome relationship that goes a long way.
5. Makes you get more clicks
Commenting is a click building strategy, not just link building as most people use it. Through commenting you can creatively draw in huge number of audience to your site, in short you can deploy it to successful use by writing awesome and valuable comments like Harleena Singh does.
6. Helps you find the content you crave
When you dive into commenting, you end up reading the comments of other bloggers or those who need their problems solved. This gives you IDEAS on new posts to write and this is beautiful because it truly addresses people’s problem.
So doing, you end up captivating the audience that had been lurking in a corner.
7. The Law of Karma
When you do something to others, others would be moved to do the same to you
8. Improves Your Writing
They say one’s writing improves with constant practice-this is certainly true. So comments can be an avenue to improve on one’s writing skills.
Sometimes, I make comments and after a period of time if I’m opportune to visit that post again, I find myself like-wow! Is it I who wrote this comment?
9. Get a Gig From an unlikely source
By commenting on blogs while also providing useful answers and advice, you can place yourself in –line for an unexpected gig. This is because your comment can trigger a person to visit your site, and subsequently a contact is made.
10. Helps You Defeat Mental Block
Are you struggling with mental block? Blog commenting can help you develop new perspectives on issues, especially if done on blogs different from your niche.
11. Build an Audience from an Unlikely Source
Commenting on a niche site different from yours can also be a way to tap into a new audience you could never have thought about.
To illustrate, let’s consider a blog in the gardening niche.
Those who comment in this niche consistently, are essentially those who are either seeking to get their gardening problem solved or looking for gardening ideas to write about.
So if you comment on a blog in the above niche, though your niche is writing-you could likely stumble on a person who may have a problem with how to effectively communicate an idea.
So, commenting on other blog is a technique that can be effectively deployed in getting a brand new audience from a niche that appears to have no correlation.
12. Can Be Used As Means of Branding Yourself
Harleena, and Adrienne are two ladies who have deployed the long-form means of writing comments. And believe me when I say they don’t go about overstretching their comments. In their comments, values are always provided. They have a way of communicating to you at an emotional level. That’s why their blogs draw in truck loads of comments.
So let’s get down to Business
The Lazy Guide To Building Your Audience Through Blog Commenting
1. Bookmark the R.SS Feeds of popular bloggers in your niche.
You can adopt feedly as your reader.
Perhaps you are at a loss on how to get the sites of these A-list bloggers not to worry, Technorati and Alltop are there to guide you.
Once, you’ve gotten the list on your laps, the next thing is for you to feed them into your feedly account.
2. Timing is Important.
Most popular bloggers publish their post on Mondays and Thursdays. Some others publish on Fridays. By noting the time or day they publish their post-you can easily comment on top blogs without feeling as if you’ve done any hard work.
3. Aspire To Be The First
Being the first commenter on a popular blog can drive awesome traffic to your site.
As I said earlier, it’s important you know the timing, especially if the blog has a particular time her scheduled post goes live.
It is imperative you don’t waste time-take advantage of it.
4. Be Respectful
To get the best out of blog commenting. It’s important you focus on your niche. While this is darn important, it’s necessary you are respectful.
This doesn’t mean you must always agree with the author. It simply means that if you are to criticize, then do it in a respectful way.
It is better you start with the positive before delving into the negative. This way the writer head will still be held high.
I have seen many comments where commenter’s go behind the scene to lash out at a blogger due to an error in spelling. They fail to consider if the blogger is a non-native English speaker.
Their correction is not done with love and you know the worst thing? As internet trolls their comments aren’t linked to their sites.
They are cowards hiding behind an invisible cloak to destroy the confidence of aspiring bloggers.
Some, on the other hand use it as a devious means to drive traffic to their site, but this is a short-lived strategy as you end up devaluing your brand.
Another reason you need to be careful is because popular bloggers have cult-like followers who can go all the way to destroy your career when they discover you purposely decide to destroy their image
Do you want to see the power of cult following? Then Mike Elgan challenge to Google trolls should suffice.
5. Provide Value
Don’t comment for the sake of just building links. Your comments should be such that other commenter’s will find value in it. This way it would prompt them to visit your site.A comment such as: Great Post or Thanks for sharing will not provide you the audience you are seeking.
Your comment should be such that it can provoke a debate or one that elicits a reply.
A comment done only for links is like a pin in a hay-stack.
6. Focus on Topic
When commenting, try not to veer off topic, this is why it’s important you read the post before commenting.7. Avoid Repetition
Most people do not read the comments thread before commenting, this is a bad habit because some of the questions that you may ask, may have already been answered. Repetition is not communication but actually miscommunication as it ends up cluttering the comment stream.
8. Ask questions
Question is a good way to elicits tactic response from the blogger and other members of the community. It also helps to stimulate thought provoking discussions.
It adds more value in the post, and as such readers are actually grateful
9. Join Communities
There are communities where sharing articles and writing comments is a great way to drive traffic to you sites.
Some of these communities include:
Kingged.com
BlogEngage
Blokube
Google Plus Communities
One reason you may not have been quite successful with this technique is you’ve only used this platform to share you content. Try and spend time on them and see a better result.
Estine Muki even wrote a beautiful post on his secret source to free blog traffic. In his post under the need to be active category, he advocated the following.
1. Submitting articles to the community (Not only limited to yours)
2. Voting (kingging) articles submitted by others.
3. Commenting on articles on the site
4. Replying to comments on the site
5. Hooking up with others as friends
6. Engaging with others in private messaging
7. Following others on board
These are just a few tactics. If you have any other tactics please share it with me as I intend to update this post soon.
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