Using Blog Comments to Drive Traffic to Your Corporate Website
The most important part of a company’s online presence is a well designed website with a lot of opportunity to engage visitors, coupled with high quality content. However, this is only half of the equation. It is vital to back up even the best websites by having strategies in place to drive traffic to them. Social media sites can be very useful for attracting a variety of visitors, but they have limitations because the audience you’re engaging with is very general. To develop an authoritative presence on the web it is necessary to engage with the other professionals in your industry to show off your expertise.
Almost every interest group has at least one forum where topics in their niche are discussed and advice is dispensed, and contributing to them can be a good way to start building your online profile. The drawback of these sites is that they don’t have the quality of content to gain a high search engine results page (SERP) ranking, and while your comments might directly attract a few new visitors to your website, all of your most erudite comments will be buried in the search engine results. Because blogs have the kind of quality content that the search engines are now looking for, posting your comments to them will give you a much higher profile in your niche than other social media links will.
To be effective it is important to have a strategy for how you will use comments. The first thing to consider is the kind of posts that you should spend your time on. As quality content is the focus of search engines it is best to avoid “spammy” sites that are more geared towards sales pitches than genuine information. Higher quality blogs will have more traffic and so your comments will be seen by more people, increasing the chances that they will follow your links back to your own website. Google has a free Page Rank Checker that allows you to see how highly ranked a blog is before you comment on it. In practice it is most productive to avoid spending time on blogs that are ranked 3/10 or less unless the content of the site itself has exceptional quality.
After choosing a blog to leave comments on the best strategy is to only comment when you have something constructive to add. It is pointless to just leave a comment that agrees with the post as it won’t get other readers to look at you more closely. Use blog comments as a chance to showcase your area of expertise by sharing your knowledge of your niche. Offer either solutions to problems or avenues of further information on the topic like links or titles of books. Don’t be too pushy about your own site when you leave comments; direct sales pitches from the competition are not likely to be approved by the webmaster. Blogs are chances to have a conversation and so the comments that you leave should join that conversation and offer some value to the others that are participating.
The number of blogs that you post on depends on how much time you have to spend on creating links. It may be a good idea to try and make 5 or 6 comments every day to start. As your profile improves, you can begin looking for the right level of involvement for your individual situation. It will take time to develop an online profile from scratch and the key to successfully building your profile with blog comments is to consistently contribute valuable information to the best sites your niche.
