Blog commenting, part I: Benefits of blog commenting

Introduction

Blog commenting is becoming more and more popular nowadays, not only because it is an easy way to build FREE topical one-way links to your website, but also because it’s a great way to meet new people and make your name recognizable among other bloggers in your field. It is also a way to form or enter a network of like-minded bloggers and build good relationships.

Whether you will use this for business or just for personal enjoyment - it’s entirely up to you.  Just keep in mind - the opportunities are there,  ready to be grasped and exploited.

Networking and meeting link-minded people

Let’s first consider social side of blogging, after all this is the most enjoyable part, I believe; and we shall turn to mercenary aspects later on.

When you leave quality comments on other people’s blogs and do this frequently, you form a long term relationship with the blog owners. This is also a great way to meet new interesting people and enter (or even create) a network of bloggers in your field.  By getting engaged in blog commenting, not only can you make your name recognisable across the blogosphere, but you can also earn yourself a good reputation and effectively promote your own blog, including any products or services it may have to offer.

The blog owners really appreciate people leaving constructive, though provoking and insightful comments, as these help them to build relationship with their readership, and if you are able to contribute a discussion by making quality comments on regular basis, your relationship with the blog owners may turn into a great friendship.

Benefits of blog commenting

Blog commenting certainly benefits both blog owners and the commenters. Let’s consider how exactly this works.

Benefits for commenters

In terms of SEO benefits, all blogs can be divided into nofollow and dofollow blogs.

Dofollow blogs

As blog commenting spam could be a series problem if not taken care of, most blog platforms  (such as Wordpress, e.g.) by default are distributed with nofollow attribute for the comments.
However, there are special plug-ins that allow a blog owner to turn his blog into a dofollow blog. You may ask, why would one want to do this? We will talk about this later, and for now let’s consider what benefits dofollow blogs may offer you as a commenter.

Improving your SERPs. Commenting on dofollow blogs helps your rankings on major search engines and, hence, increases your traffic. If,  in addition, those blogs are also topically-related to your blog, you will get quality one-way topical links, which are indispensable in helping your site to rank well on highly competitive terms. You do have to comment a lot, however, for the effect to be seen, but having gotten into habit of doing this often will undoubtedly bear fruits.

Increasing PR. If you comment on high-PR blogs, particularly if the commented page itself has a high PR, you can increase your site PR absolutely FREE by providing quality comments. Comments’ Quality is extremely important, as high-PR blogs are usually moderated manually and only quality informative comments get published.

Deep links. Blog commenting is one of the best techniques to build deep links to your site. If you do have some products or services to sell, you should remember that deep links have a huge value for any e-business that wants to succeed. Internet surfers are lazy, they do value their time a lot, and hence if you can give them direct link to the product/service they are interested in and provided sufficient info about the product/service on that page, they are much more likely to buy from you.

If you lead a PPC campaign (such Google Adwords) to get a targeted traffic to your site, you will surely appreciate the great value of deep links.

Link building services. If you are really good at writing insightful, captivating comments that are useful to the blog’s audience, you could offer this skill as a paid link building service on SEO and webmaster forums.

How to find Dofollow blogs on a given subject? You can do it manually using blog’s search engines, but this is a very time consuming blindfolded job, not always giving the expected result.
I personally use Fast blog finder software.  There are both Free version and Gold version.  Free version allows you to search up to 50 blogs, of which there are usually only 5-10% are dofollow. Not many, I agree. However, it’s good to start from Free version to see if you like it and then you can always upgrade to the Gold version.  At the time of writing it’s $49 and well worth the money!

Nofollow blogs

Although links from  nofollow blogs have no value in terms of passing link juice or PR to your site, they can still be of great value to you.  Of course, most of thing I will discuss here are also applicable to dofollow blogs. In the preceding subsection I just singled out the  features that are solely pertinent to dofollow blogging, whereas here all additional benefits of blog commenting are considered.

Traffic generation. Commenting on blogs with high traffic can bring a good traffic to your blog, provided, of course, your comments are valuable and interesting. No matter whether your comments are constructive (i.e. adding value to the post) or destructive (i.e. criticising statements and opinions in the post), they can be equally effective in bringing visitors to your site. Of course, you should stick to the generally accepted blogging etiquette and avoid common blogging DON’Ts.

Branding your name. This has already been mentioned in the Introduction, I just want to re-emphasize it here once again, as these is one of the greatest benefits blog commenting can bring about.
Be careful though, make only those statements of which you are 100% sure or, if that is an opinion,  do not  present it as an ultimate truth. Be considerate and polite, do not insult either blog owner or his visitors.

Building relationships. Again,  this aspect was mentioned previously, but should be reiterated here. By providing quality comments on regular basis you may be-friend interesting (but not necessarily popular, as those are often too busy) bloggers in your field. This is extremely important,  not only because you can find like-minded people and benefit from drawing inspiration for your own articles while reading their blogs, but also because the other blog owners may help you to promote your blog either intentionally (by commenting at your blog themselves, writing about your blog and/or your most interesting posts) or indirectly (by opening you a “green corridor” and accepting most of your comments and thus regularly sending you traffic).

Benefits for blog owners

As I said previously, blog commenting is mutually beneficial and blog owners may reap from it as many fruits as the commenters.

Free content. Regardless of  some “SEO gurus” saying that blog comments are greatly devalued by Google, they are still a content.  And what is more - it’s  FREE! It would surely be a shame to skip on such a wonderful opportunity, wouldn’t it???

Keeping the conversation lively.   Blog comments help you, as a blog owner, to get readers to pay attention to specific posts and keep the conversation lively. In this way they help to add live to your blog and make it (more) popular.

Indicator of popularity. Abundant comments indicate that a particular post resonate strongly with the blog readers , thus giving the blog owner a clue on what topics arouse most interest and  help the blogger to generate content that is attractive to readers. It also tells the blog owner that his readers enjoy reading the blog and take their time to share their thoughts and opinions.  All in all, it’s an excellent indicator of blog’s popularity.

Builds Your Blog readership. Remeber that question above - why would you want to make your blog dofollow? Well, here is the answer - If you allow dofollow feature for comments, it may notably enhance your blog popularity, as visitors will come to leave a link to their sites and some of them may turn into your permanent visitors. As other popular bloggers say, installing dofollow helped them to make their blog a really friendly place.

Benefits of dofollow. There are also so called Dofollow Search Engines and Dofollow Networks that help the dofollow blog owners  to raise their popularity. Ultimately, both the commenters and blog owners help each other in promoting their blogs! Dofollow attribute tremendously enhanced participation and involvement of their readers.

The blog your are reading is also a DOFOLLOW BLOG.  You are welcome to leave a comment to this or any other posts on this blog, and if your comments adds a value to the post and/or expands on the topic,  I will certainly approve it!

In the next article I will consider Blog Commenting Techniques. This will discuss about where, when and how to do the commenting to make sure it is always (or nearly always) approved  and brings you the most benefits. Watch out for that!

Your Feedback

Your feedback is greatly appreciated at this blog.
Let me know your thoughts about effective blog commenting, its benefits and  strategies.
I look forward to hearing from you!

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