High traffic is not going to happen as quickly as you might think if you just rely on search results. If you want to bump up your website traffic, you must promote your website. While you can do this with paid ads and social media, one of the most effective ways is through commenting on other blogs.
But how do you promote your website with blog comments?
The steps are:
- Find niches similar to yours
- Leave comments that are meaningful
- Add value to the competitor’s blog post
- Build relationships with your own brand
- Be an authority and leave important links
All these five steps are what it takes to build traffic to your blog. While promotion is a great action plan, you must know as early as now that you should never ever spam.
Website promotion through blog commenting happens when you go to someone else’s blog, leave a comment, and then leave a link to your own website. If done right, this can produce amazing results.
Find Niches Similar to Yours
What is a niche?
A niche is a topic category. It can be broad or it can be specific. ‘Dogs’ is a broad niche, but ‘Retrievers’ is a specific niche.
To be able to comment on other blogs for marketing purposes, you need to find other blogs that are similar to yours.
Why is this important? If you leave a comment on a blog that is not related to your niche, people are not going to click it. If you are blogging about dog training, and yet you go to a blog about motorcycles and leave a comment there, what are the odds that these motorheads would be interested in what you have to say?
If you do that, people would think you are a spammer. Your comment has nothing to do with the niche, and the blog owner can see through you. Chances are he would delete your post, or those other commenters would dislike your post.
You need to find niches because you are looking for a community. A person who is interested in dogs would find himself on a dog-related blog. If you leave a comment on that blog, then that same person who sees your comment would be curious about what your website is like, which is also about dogs.
Leave Comments that are Meaningful
One thing that makes people fail at this marketing activity is the lack of substance. What they do is simply leave a comment that says “Hey, I got a post similar to this.”
If you leave comments like this, or just leave links, you are a spammer. Nobody wants or likes a spammer and you will not get the traffic you are hoping for.
Meaningful comments are those that express appreciation for the author. A meaningful comment can also be argumentative, without being rude. If you do not believe what the author has to say, question it and present your argument in a nice and respectful way.
Many bloggers find this difficult to do as they are mostly obsessed with just leaving links to other blogs. What they do not realize is that one fundamental pillar to success in this marketing strategy is by saying something wise and helpful.
Add Value to the Competitor’s Blog Post
If the blog post of your competitor has nine tips, then add two or more. Explain your additional tips in the blog comments, and you would add value to that blogger’s readers.
Why is this important?
You need to add value to be seen as a serious member of the community. As a valued member of that blog site, people would see that you actually care about the niche and that you want to make a contribution to the people who visit the blog.
If you merely leave links without adding value, you would be seen as an opportunist who is just trying to steal traffic.
Adding value does not mean leaving a post and say “I have the same article, but longer” or “my tips are better”. These comments are arrogant, to say the least.
At best, you have to add a paragraph or two to the blog post through the comment, explain what your argument’s merits are, and then leave a link saying there is more information found in your blog post.
If you do this, you are using your comment as a bait. If that bait is good enough, the reader is going to click on your link and go to your website.
Build Relationships with Your Own Brand
If your goal is to troll, then, by all means, do not use your own identity. But if your goal is to promote your website, you have to use your name, your photo, and your brand.
You want to come across as a real person or a brand—that you are not a spammer hiding behind the cloak of internet anonymity.
As you leave comments on the blog posts, make sure you can track them so you can get back to them if there are comments about your comments.
If your comment generated a conversation, make sure you are there to reply if people have other questions. You need to build relationships so you can get known.
If you post blog comments, it is much more effective to do this on several websites. If you do, chances are that the same people are hanging out on these websites, and then your face and name are going to be remembered.
To build a relationship, you must answer people’s queries and you must spend time on these pages. You have to get to know others. If another blogger posted a comment on yours, visit their site, and post comments there, too.
Be an Authority and Leave Important Links
To promote your website, you must establish yourself as an authority. As an authority figure, your words are the nail in the coffin in your particular niche.
You will become an authority if you do the last three tips. On top of that, an authority is someone who does not let other people down. If you see any information that is wrong, or if someone else is contesting your posts, you have to be assertive but not disrespectful.
You have to keep your cool and focus on the discussion. As an authority, you have to back up your claims with statistics or your personal experience.
Also, you do not want to leave only your links. It would be of great significance if you leave links to other source materials, especially established authority websites, like Statista, or news sites that people trust.
Summary
As a blogger, you can grow your traffic and following if you get yourself involved in a community. This community must be made up of people who share the same interests as you do.
If you promote your website, you need to first give value to people. If you don’t, you would look like someone just peddling his wares.
On the internet, where everything is free, nobody wants another person who only wants to take and take.
What people want is a person who is willing to give. Give value to your target market by leaving blog comments that are relevant and helpful, and you will succeed in driving traffic to your own site one day.
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