Blog Commenting Flops: Do These to Lose Traffic and Links

Blog commenting is great for traffic generation, increasing your blog’s popularity, establishing your expertise, networking and making long lasting relationships, SEO and link building, among the others.

There is nothing wrong in providing a link back to the commenter who has taken the time to read your blog post and leave a comment there; without commenters there will be dead silence on your blog, that’s for sure.

Well, this is a bit off topic, but I want to tell you that every blogger must reward their commenters in one way or another.

This will get you more comments and more loyal readers to your blog, which equals more traffic, in simple words.

For instance, I reward my commenters with dofollow links, Keywordluv, Commentluv, featuring top commenters, showing recent comments and I also do a lucky draw (biweekly) of the active commenters and feature two winners.

I am sure Ana is excellent in rewarding commenters; you can see that right here at her blog.

Now coming back to the topic of this post, blog commenting will not guarantee you traffic UNLESS you do it right.

To “do it right”, you will have to follow at least the basic blog commenting ethics, which require you to:

• read the post before commenting;
• be respectful;
• leave valuable comments – not just “great post”;
• write real name in “Name” field and not keywords;
• not litter comments with links – since you already have a place to leave a link to your website and most blogs have CommentLuv now, so that you can also leave a link to one of your recent posts;
• and so on.

Following these rules is not too difficult since most of them are just common sense.

But I am talking about those who follow all these common sense ethics in blog commenting, but still scratch their heads without knowing the reason why their blog commenting efforts are not paying off.

Well they won’t pay off until you do it right, I say that again.

So I am writing this post after being fed up with commenters on my own blog and watching those commenters who do it the wrong way on blogs I read regularly.

Biggest Blog Commenting Mistakes

The biggest mistake I see blog commenters make is IGNORANCE.

Come on, this is 2011 and you have to wake up. The commenting system and comment forms on blogs are not the same they used to be even a couple of years ago.

There are quite a few of great features, which were introduced for the benefit of commenters – that is YOU, and you are simply ignoring them.

So how could you expect to get any website traffic?

Even worse, you are not ignoring those features, but using them in the wrong way simply because you don’t want to learn or pay attention to all that newer stuff.

But the rest of the blogosphere does!

I will address a couple of things many commenters are ignorant about.

Ignorant about using Commentluv

Almost 90% of the blogs in the blogosphere have the CommentLuv plugin installed.

This is an awesome plugin that helps the blogger to reward their commenters by allowing them to leave a (do-follow) link back to one of their recent posts.

1.   Register on ComLuv.com

Do you know that registering your blog at Comluv website allows you to pick out a link from one of your 10 most recent posts instead of just your last one?

Sometimes your latest post might not be too relevant to the post you are leaving a comment on. Choosing from one of the 10 latest posts could help you change that.

2.   www vs non-www & CommentLuv

Did you know that the “www” and “no-www” versions of your blogs are treated different by Comluv?

If you register only one version, you will not get the option to choose from 10 latest posts if you use the other version.

Note from Ana: you should always choose to use only one version of your site – www or non-www; up to you. But choose it and stick with it. It’ll make a huge difference to your SEO efforts.

To learn more about the topic, look up WWW vs non-WWW: Why You Should Put All Your Links in One Basket

3.  Banned URL

Sometimes, as you comment on a blog and try to leave a CommentLuv link, a strange error occurs and no links are returned.

You think that there is something wrong with plugin installation at that blog, or a downtime with Comluv.

Nope!

You have to unban your URL by going to http://comluv.com/member/unban-url/. You can also read up on how your URL gets banned there.

Ignorant about using Keywordluv

Ana has already talked about KeywordLuv here at TGC, where she explained its benefits.

Now, I see a lot of people assuming that every blog is KWL enabled.

No! Such blogs are obvious with a notification message.

With a KWL enabled blog, you type yourname@yourkeyword so that your keyword carries a link back to your blog. But if you do it on a blog that doesn’t have KWL, all you get SEO-wise is a strange string of characters that don’t translate into any meaningful anchor text.

However, you can still get some SEO benefits with “Jane @ Cheap Domains” (note that this is just an example keyword) because the keyword is still around there. But you can get the most out of it by using a simple tip – use a separator ” | “, called “vertical bar” or “pipe“.

You may ask me if @ is a separator or not. Well, it is not a good one in terms of SEO, since @ translates to “@” in HTML  when you view any site page source (thanks, Ana, for pointing this out).

But you have got an excellent separator that looks just the same in the html and the non-html version – it is the pipe (the one above the “Enter” key to be used with Shift)!

If I use Jane | Cheap Domains in the name field then Google sees that as two different words “Jane” and “Cheap Domains” and I get backlined for both these words.

So you have your name there and also your keyword – deal.

But you really have to check since some bloggers never allow keywords in the name field even if you use it with your name.

Outsourcing Blog Commenting

This is one of the biggest blunders people are doing, wasting precious time and money. They outsource blog commenting by hiring people to leave comments on other blogs with the urls and anchor texts they specify.

First of all, your comments speak for you and people judge you by your comments (just like a blog post or a guest post you write).

So you cannot (well I will never) compromise on that!

Secondly, it is your reputation, your SEO efforts and in short your blogging future that depends on those people who agree to leave 100 comments on other blogs for $5.

Comment without reading

This one comes under the basic common sense stuff.

But it definitely needs a separate mention. Some people think that they are smart, scan the whole post and leave a controversial comment or a comment with a question.

Well, they know the trick that leaving a controversial comment or provoking a discussion will grab attention.

But they don’t realize how dumb they look when the author or someone else points out that their question is answered right at the blog post!

Marketing Takeaway

Blog commenting, if done correctly, will get you lot of traffic.

It should definitely be a part of your overall blog promotion strategy.

But make sure you handle the loose ends. Use common sense and don’t hesitate to learn about a new plugin or a feature.

Now tell me your experiences with “incorrect” blog commenting strategies.

If you like this post and think it would be valuable to your followers, share the ish out of it for me, would you?