Build Backlinks Blog commenting Benefits, Strategies and Best Practices

Blog commenting strategy, yeah, it matters a lot in getting traffic. However, not in the way that you may be thinking. Keep reading…

Many bloggers think that blog comments drive traffic only because of the URL left on that blog. Bloggers who think like this leave shallow comments like nice post, Keep up the good work, blah blah… They think that future commentators click on it and it leads to referral traffic. The fact is that, by leaving one-liner comments on blogs, you spoil your online reputation, and no one ever clicks on your URL.

Benefits of blog commenting

Exposure really matters. In the competitive blogging world, one cannot simply get expected traffic by only producing good content. Your good content without exposure will be buried alive by the

quality content that has good exposure (read again). Do you know one thing? Decent content (Not really of high quality) with great exposure gets insane traffic.

Blog commenting is the surefire way to gain exposure with fellow bloggers and webmasters.

The links in the comments you leave also act as backlinks to your blog. I know almost all the blogs nofollow the external comment links, but still Google gives some weight for the links in the comments. Let me explain you how. It’s a fact that you receive clicks on your link only when your comment is insightful. If your link receives more clicks, Google gives more value to your comment link.

By commenting on the blogs of your same niche, you get targeted readers. Suppose if your blogging niche is about blogging, then commenting on blogging blogs helps you. Because there will be people gathered who are already interested in your niche.

Dropping insightful comments on reputed blogs increase your visibility to the good amount of people interested in your niche. When they come across your blog in the SERPs, they definitely increase CTR of your blog.

Imagine being the earliest commenter on a blog post, which receives tons of comments. How much traffic you get?

Not so much! Really.

Why?

Merely being the first commenter? No one gives a damn.

Being the earliest commenter to leave an  insightful comment is the best way to gain traffic. Try to leave value-added comments on influential blogs in your niche. You will get targeted traffic and in turn great comments on your blog also.

A tool to get an email alert when blog is updated with a new post: BlogTrottr or IFTTT

However, remember to drop comments only on the blogs of your niche.

Blog commenting: Strategies and best practices

Setup a Gravatar;

Name with no avatar looks spammy. Without your avatar, there are fewer chances of approval of your comments. Because there is no way to tell whether there is a legitimate person behind the comment.

Moreover, having an avatar reflects your personality, what kind of person you are (Friendly, dynamic, motivating, or a geek). Your photo speaks of your personality more than words, hence the name avatar.

Use your real name for commenting, I saw many commenters who comment by keeping their company as their name. This smells fishy (even if they are legit).

Do not use rich keyword anchor text. It gives an impression that you are commenting on the blog solely for backlink purposes.

Many of the webmasters mark anchor text rich blog comments as spam. As this happens more, the email address and domain will be blacklisted by Akismet and other comment systems. In order to avoid being blacklisted, your comments should be natural and should not be only for the purpose of backlinks.

Avoid grammatical mistakes. I know Matt Cutts, told you that grammatical mistakes in blog comments do not count. However, he never told that grammatical mistakes in comments do not hurt your credibility. Silly grammatical mistakes (not typos) make you a shallow blogger in the eyes of others.

Treat commenting as micro-blogging. Your comments should return value to the future visitors of their blog. At least, keep the comments 4 lines long.  This builds credibility and trust. Treat commenting as establishing yourself as a niche expert.
Always leave comments related to the topic. Leaving generic comments that are applicable to all sort of blog posts is a spam.

Comment early. Being the first commenter on many blogs, increases your visibility and it develops a relationship with the fellow bloggers. The bonus thing is that commenting on a blog post before the search engine even indexed it ensures that your comment is indexed along with the indexation of the blog post.

Mark the mistakes of the blogger. Feel free to do so, be direct, talk open, but do not troll or tease.

Some of the bloggers make intentional mistakes as part of their blogging strategy. If you point out their mistakes, they feel happy as they come to know of a loyal reader of their blog, i.e. you!

Always read the blog post and previous posts before commenting. Without reading the entire blog post or the existing comments, you make dumb mistakes. Like, asking a question that has already an answer for it or pointing out that he missed a point, although he/she has covered that point (Spoiler- Ctrl+F ;-)).

Final words

There are many other silly mistakes that I’ve intentionally not covered in this article because you realized all those points within the above points only.

As this a wrapping up section, I would like to tell you to be natural, don’t stuff keywords and don’t appear robotic. Use comments section what it is intended for. Building backlinks should be your least priority while commenting on blog posts. Building credibility online and returning value to future commenters of that blog post should be your priority.

These are some of the blog commenting benefits, best practices and strategies. I hope you enjoyed this article. If so, share this article. Doubts or any sporadic ideas on strategies of blog commenting? Leave a reply.