5 Key Components You’ll Need to Gain Maximum Traffic From Blog Comments

Blog comments are part targeted advertisement, part business card, and part SEO tool, cleverly disguised as a short paragraph — provided you know how to wield your comment power.

Contrary to what the spammers think, comments are more than just a backlink for Google rank. The rewards are much greater. You just need a solid message to serve, and a strategy that’s going to support you through anywhere from 5-15 comments a day. That’s a real campaign, and without a plan, you’ll never make it past the first two days.

But if you’re consistent, a targeted blog commenting campaign can send an extra 20-50+ visitors to your blog every day – and even though they won’t all come from the comments, they’ll come because of your comments. I’ll explain that residual effect later.

So what will you need?

1) A Gravatar

Gravatar is short for “globally recognized avatar,” which may sound a bit complicated, but the service is really quite simple. When you sign up at Gravatar.com, you’ll upload a picture of yourself, enter some biographical info, and link to your social media accounts.

Most blogs are synced in with the Gravatar database. Which means, whenever you leave a comment – (using the same e-mail address that you registered with your Gravatar account) – your picture is automatically added to your comment.

Why is this important? Because commenting is a form of social networking and adding a face to a name helps build and solidify that infamous brand called you. While blog readers may not recognize your name, they’ll remember your face if they start seeing it over and over and over.

Without a Gravatar, you’ll most likely end up with the default Mystery Man look. Since a lot of spammers don’t use a Gravatar, don’t be surprised if your comment gets trashed more than usual without one.

2) A big list of blogs

Some blogs are updated 4-5 times a week, which is great for blog commenting purposes. Others, only once or twice a week — sometimes less. Because there’s such a wide range of updates going on, you need a healthy list of blogs to start with.

Remember, your goal is to keep a steady momentum of 5-15 blog comments a day because consistency is your best friend.

To find blogs in your niche try:

Google Blog Search

Technorati

Blekko

As far as a organizing your newly compiled blog list, I prefer the Google Reader. Add in the RSS feed for each blog and categorize them (i.e. SEO, social media, blogging, etc) into folders. The folders are especially important if your blog covers a range of topics.

For example, if I’ve just written an article about the Amazon affiliate program, I like to comment on affiliate marketing blogs for a couple of days. If I write about Twitter, I’ll hit the social media blogs. If at all possible, it’s good to have your most recent blog article match the type of blog you’re writing on.

The 3rd component will actually help you do that.

3) A ComLuv Network account

Not all blogs have CommentLuv installed (unfortunately), but if they do, you’ll want to have a ComLuv Network account already setup.

First off, what is CommentLuv? It’s a plugin that displays and links to a commenter’s blog post title, within the comment. CommentLuv is installed here so you can see what a valuable piece of real estate it gives you.

When I hover my mouse over the ComLuv heart, this is what pops up:

Now if you don’t have a ComLuv Network account, the CommentLuv plugin will automatically show the title of your last blog post. That’s fine most of the time. But what if you’re commenting on a Twitter-related post, and your last blog post was on goal achievement? You might not get any clicks.

However, once you have a ComLuv Network account, you’ll be able to choose your Twitter-related post title to display in the Twitter-related comment. In other words, ComLuv lets you choose which article title you want to appear on CommentLuv enabled blogs. Matching similar content with similar content is an easy way to increase your clicks.

4) A click worthy post title

On CommentLuv enabled blogs, it’s easy to scan the list of titles from each commenter faster than it is to read their actual comments.

You know what that means, right? Make sure ALL of your blog post titles have some zing to them, even the old ones… (since you may want to display an old post to match the content you’re commenting on).

Here’s an example of a click worthy transformation:

BORING: How to Generate Keywords for Your Niche Blog

ZINGY: How to Use Wordtracker to Build a King Kong Sized Keyword List for Your Niche Blog

ZINGY: Why Your Niche Blog Won’t Rank in Google – and What You Can Do About It

5) A comment that makes readers go “hmmm”

If CommentLuv isn’t installed on a blog, your comment is going to be the main reason why people click through to your website. And very few (if any) are going to click through if all you’ve contributed is a generic, “Gee, that was great!” In fact, some bloggers won’t even approve a comment like that.

Think of your blog comments as mini-articles, and you’ll always say click worthy stuff. Offer your opinion, your insight, or your experiences with the topic at hand. Better still, ask questions because then you’ll receive a reply to your comment which could make it stand out even more.

A lot of people say don’t make your comment too long. For me, “too long” is more 4 paragraphs, with each paragraph consisting of 3-4 sentences. I try to maintain a 1-2 paragraph comment at most.

The REAL Reason Why a Blog Commenting Campaign Works

Thanks to blog commenting, I’ve managed to generate 80+ visitors a day to a relatively brand new blog. But it wasn’t ‘just’ because of the comments.

Commenting leads to camaraderie with other bloggers. Camaraderie leads to retweets and stumbles and Diggs and even joint ventures. When you’re constantly popping up all over the place, other bloggers do take notice, and if your work is good enough, they’ll automatically start spreading it for you.