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This is part of the the book BLOGTASTIC! Growing and Making a Difference Through Blogging. You can read the table of contents and follow the book on this page:
See the table of contents for the book here: BLOGTASTIC project
Previous article: Say more than “me too.”
BLOGTASTIC!: All about comments
Commenting on other blogs is such an important part of the blogging strategy that it warrants its own section.
Writing a comment on another blog is still a type of “new blog content.” By leaving the URL of your blog (i.e., the direct blog link, not the website link), your comments also drive traffic from other sites back to your own
If you are serious about driving traffic to your relatively new blog, I suggest you start commenting on a few blogs each week. Another powerful practice is to comment on threads that link to you or discuss you, your blog, (or your books in the case of authors), which will put you in contact with a steady stream of new blogs, represent you well to all readers of that conversation, and cement new online relationships. To be effective, comments need to be added in a timely fashion, which on high-traffic blogs translates to within 24 hours or even less.
Easy-to-use tools to make a quick daily check yourself include:
Through observation-conversation, you may discover that some of your target audience congregates in unexpected places. For example, your potential clients may enjoy golf blogs, travel blogs, or wine blogs. (Yes, there are blogs about everything.)
You may want to adopt the strategy of “fishing where the fish are” and creating a private list (for your bookmarks or RSS reader) where you can read and join the conversation. If you check back the day after leaving a comment, in many cases the blog host will have responded to you, since conversations can continue for some time in comments.
To make it easy for your readers to check back on the development of comments on your own blog, you can also enable a feature to “subscribe to these comments”, where readers can opt-in to receive updates to the comments by email. Comments are the first level of cross-blog conversation. The next stage is to seize good articles etc. and use your blog to comment on them, with a hotlink to the original. Cross-linking builds relationships, credibility (it is standard practice) and traffic.
A quick note on commenting etiquette:
Although commenting on other blogs is one of the best ways to become part of the community, there are a few guidelines for making sure your comments get noticed. As discussed earlier, writing “nice post” comment will not do much. Act as if you were having a face-to-face conversation. Point out exactly what you liked, or what you learned from another blogger’s post, and mention a post/article/personal experience that supports it.
Share something that’s relevant to the conversation. Or try to add to the discussion by showing another side of the issue. Comments should not be about selling your own blog or product. But, if one of your posts adds genuine value to the discussion, bring it up.
Blogging Tip: Use comments effectively to elevate the level of conversation
The author of the original blog post will be happy to see a comment that will raise the level of conversation sparked by his or her blog post. It takes time, energy and dedicated effort to write comments that add value. Invest in that activity and reap rewards in the long run.
Rajesh Setty is an entrepreneur, author and speaker based in Silicon Valley. He maintains another blog called Life Beyond Code and tweets as @UpbeatNow