The Power of Commenting: How a Skeptic Became a Believer

Posted by Francis Raymond September 30th 09

When it comes to content marketing, the power of one simple habit is often forgotten. If you're consistent and genuine, commenting on other blogs and websites is an efficient way to highlight your own content and, more importantly, build relationships and reputation.

In a funny guest post on Problogger.net, Josh Hanagarne aka World’s Strongest Librarian, talks about how he has gone from being a commenting skeptic to a believer.

"I’d never tried commenting as a traffic-building strategy, mainly because I’m not smart or patient enough to strategize," writes Hanagarne. "For the record, I read a ton of blogs. It’s just rare that I comment."

Then, after being asked about his position on blog commenting in an interview, he froze and realized he should look into whether commenting is actually worthwhile.

How? He spent one week trying to leave as many comments as possible.

Now, he did have a head start, because he targeted his comments at bloggers who had commented on another guest post he had written on the ultra-popular Problogger.net. He went through the comments on his post, sifting out genuine comments from spam, and visited the commenters' blogs to see if he could add anything of value to the discussion. He ended up leaving about 30 comments over the course of the week.

The results? "After I left the comments, the numbers went up again," writes Hanagarne, "far beyond the typical spikes following a Problogger guest post."

Higher numbers translated into a 100-per-cent increase of RSS subscribers (160 to 320) and 40 new newsletter subscribers.Not bad for a week's work! But, as Hanagarne, goes onto say, even more important than the numbers are the relationships that commenting can facilitate. In that spirit, here are some other posts that offer inspiration on commenting:

In a post titled 5 Tips for Getting More from Your Blog, Duct Tape Marketing talks about simple ways to engage your comment community.

This post on DoshDosh, titled Rethinking Blog Comments: Much more than just a quick way to get web traffic, captures the idea that comments are an extension of your personal brand. "A comment left on a popular blog may be viewed by a few hundred people in one day. Multiply that by the lifespan of the blog and you’ll see that a simple comment may say a lot about you. Every blog comment is usually permanent. It’s not just a hyperlink but a long-term representation of your brand." For the record, this DoshDosh post got 186 comments.

From Chris Garrett's 10 Reasons Commenting is Good for Bloggers, reason #7 reads: "You never know who is reading – It amazes me who reads my comments on obscure blogs that I thought only myself and a handful of others read. My comments on one blog lead to a consulting gig. You never know unless you try."

Caroline Middlebrook has commenting down to a science. Her post Do You Have a Blog Commenting Strategy? has great tips on things like setting up a hit list of blogs to comment on. Interestingly, she notes that since she's in the UK, it's difficult for her to be a top commenter on U.S.-based blogs, because of the time-zone difference. She works around this issue by commenting more on Australian blogs.