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Writing comments on other blogs is one of the main ways to get your name out there. It’s a free form of promotion and fits in nicely with the general ethos of what blogging is all about. When it comes to commenting on blog articles there are four main benefits which arise:

• Drive visitors to your blog 
• Develop relationships with bloggers
• For SEO purposes
• To receive more comments on your own blog

The downside of commenting on other blogs regularly is that it is time-consuming and the benefits aren’t immediately obvious. Worse still, when commenting is done in a hap-hazard and unfocused way significant benefits can never arise.

What you need to do is to develop an effective comment strategy:

Developing an effective comment strategy is a 3 step process… the art of setting goals, selecting your target blogs, and contributing comments which help to fulfil these goals.

1) Setting Goals

Every comment strategy should have one primary goal, with this goal being any one of the four benefits mentioned at the beginning of this article.

Your primary goal is the driving force behind your selection of target blogs and the type of comments which you contribute. Without one single goal in mind your strategy will be too unfocused, too shallow, resulting in disappointing results.

This doesn’t mean you can’t develop multiple comment strategies, just that you can’t look to achieve your desired results with one broad ‘comment when I feel like it’ approach.

2) Selecting Your Target Blogs

With your main goal identified you can now move on to blog selection. If you’re looking to receive more comments on your blog only leaving comments on A-list blogs is not going to achieve the desired results, but then if you’re looking to drive visitors to your blog you may want to focus your efforts on these blogs. Alternatively, when commenting to build links you’ll need to identify a list of high PageRank DoFollow blogs.

Your selection of blogs will differ hugely depending on your primary goal, which is the main reason why most people don’t see any tangible results through commenting on blogs. There is no specific selection of blogs to focus on.

3) Executing Your Comment Strategy

With your primary goal decided on and the corresponding selection of blogs to target compiled the next step is to execute your comment strategy.

When executing your strategy the required quality of your comments depends on your goal. If you’re commenting to build links the quality of your comments isn’t essential. Contribute something of value to the article is still desirable but no longer essential - quantity is just as important as quality. On the other hand comments of real value need to be contributed to develop relationships or bring bloggers over to your blog to comment.

So there you have it - the three steps to developing an effective comment strategy, all hinging from which primary goal is chosen.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at how to develop highly effective comment strategies for each of the four benefits: traffic, relationships, SEO, and obtaining more comments on your own blog. Stay tuned!

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