Bring New Readers To Your Blog By Comment Posting in Early Days

The adage of “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t always hold up online. Though great content is a necessity for any blog that wants to succeed, it simply isn’t enough by itself.

However, getting new readers to your site can feel like an exercise in frustration. To get a lot of targeted visitors, you need to have a good search engine presence. To get that, you need to have a lot of inbound links. That, in turn, requires a lot of people come by your site and like it enough to link to it.

This can make starting a blog feel hopeless, as if there is no way to get it off the ground.

But there is one technique that is often-overlooked, blog commenting, as it can be a simple, powerful way to attract targeted readers to your site and slowly build up your link presence. This, in the long run, can help you drive organic traffic to your site and cause your readership to start snowballing.

Best of all, it’s very simple to do and only requires a few minutes out of your day to make it work.

Use Twitter blog search tools to find people who are talking about topics related to your blog. Though the content doesn’t have to be “new” to be worth commenting on, new posts are usually better to target as comments on such posts are more likely to be read, both by the site’s owner and by its readers.

A good topic is one where anyone who is interested in reading that post will likely enjoy your site as well. Either something related to your topic or something you have different information on usually works best.

What isn’t very important is the traffic of the site. Though higher traffic is better, it might actually work against you, causing your comment to get lost. Sometimes a well-timed comment on a smaller site is much better than a lone comment in a swarm on a larger one.

Once you post a comment, keep track of it. If people are interested in what you have to say and begin to reply to your comment, engage with them and keep the conversation going. The only thing better than one good comment is several more good comments.

Best of all, the people you meet this way often become your first fans and a foundation that you can build the rest of your site’s traffic on.

In the end, when you first start out a site, especially if you don’t have a popular platform to launch it from, you will need to work hard for your first view visitors, often times working for hours just to get a small handful of people to come by.

However, all of that clawing to move the hit counter pays off in the long run as you develop a loyal reader base that eventually helps spread the word for you and helps you build search engine trust.

Posting blog comments is a great way to get to that point.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a psd to html service company which provides psd to html formatting conversions.  Lior also consults for the international MA in political science department at the Tel Aviv University.

View the original article here

Why should you never comment on Blogs. Ever.

This guest post is by David Hartstein of JG Visual.

I'm sure you've heard good thoughtful, logical arguments for why you should be commenting on blogs:

"You can be a part of the conversation happening out there." "You can build your own authority." "You can drive traffic to your blog. "

But, although there is a burnt, unpopped kernel of truth in these statements may, none of them take into account the many reasons why you should never comment on a blog.

Well here are some of the reasons for your cooperation.

First and foremost, you should not even begin to think about the comment unless you have something really profound to say.  If you simply agreed, it's probably judgment will rain down on you.  If, to be honest, it should.  There is no room for only opinions in the comment section of a blog.  It is after all a blog.  No feelings, just facts.

Plus there is a good chance that you don't have permission to comment on a post.  I mean, if someone is writing a post, they are certainly held in high esteem by all of the peers in their field.  The Internet don't let just anyone publish.  And if you're not an expert, you probably have a lot to offer.  Sure, maybe you have some ideas, but they are the kind that are best kept to yourself?  Unless you have a graduate degree in the subject at hand, they should probably be stowed in your journal.

Moreover, if no one else has responded yet, you are essentially your head on the chopping block.  You could write one, but doing so opens you up to the minority position.  It is quite possible that just after you have finished singing the praises of a certain function, a set of users will go on an angry tirade ripping apart of the author.  You would look really stupid.  Who cares what you thought?  Which other commenters probably know more than you anyway.

Also, remember that browser spell check leave something to be desired.  Certainly, it will be a word that you have slaughtered, but what about something more minute catch?  And any form of oversee your grammar forgotten.  Plus, there is a very good chance that a misspelled word will leave what you must say incomprehensible, leading to angry comments about the spam you leave behind.

Once you've waded through the murky waters of actually composing your comment, you're still faced with giving away your personal information.  If you're anything like the average web user, you probably still not given out a lot of personal info online before, maybe with the exception of some obscure social networking site.

If you feel the need to comment, you have the required authority to do that, and other people have already responded, consider the following action:

Design the comment in a word processor.Check the comment for misspellings and grammatical errors, both with the built-in tools and manually.Re-check. Send a family member or a friend for their thoughts (choose someone smart).Print out, sleep on it and it again at breakfast the next day.If you still feel the urge, you go ahead and publish it.Dealing with the resulting consequences.

If after reading this, you still are just to publish a comment from time to time, go ahead.  But consider yourself warned.  It is a dangerous game.

And, whatever you do, don't you dare write a comment on this post!

David Hartstein is a partner at JG Visual, an internet strategy company that works with organizations to develop and implement their online presence.  You can connect with David at the JG Visual Facebook page.

View the original article here