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Here is my honest feedback about commenting commitments and systems, I used to comment on 100+ blogs per day 3 years ago when I was a newbie blogger.
Commenting for reciprocal comments and backlinks reminds me of the "Entrecard days" where you drop to receive a drop and sure I did 300 drops per day and got 300 views/drops back per day in return. The same rule is with commenting, you eventually can’t keep up the momentum and risk burnout. Let’s say you write 100 comments, at 70 words per comment. This is 7,000 words, and you could have written 14 (500 word posts) and those 14 posts would be SEO indexed articles showing up in Google SERP which STAY there.
The REAL way to get audience is from Google Search and SERP, not from referrals from blog comments, this can produce spikes but is very temporary. The original http://theinfopreneur.net, which is now http://theinfopreneur.tv/ owner was a good example, he originally commented on 300-400 blogs per day and in 30-60 days of starting his first blog, he had lowered his Alexa from 4 million to 23,000+ and had over 1,000 visits per day just from his massive commenting routine. He eventually sold off his site, new owner did not keep up momentum and site plummeted in Alexa, visits and overall changed direction.
Even if you are lucky enough to attract the attention of 10 bloggers per month, with social media audiences totaling 10,000 per blogger, and get 100,000 retweets/shares from audience, you are still talking about an average of 1-2% click rating which brings you 2,000 views per month. Negligible compared to fine tuning SEO, capturing trends and really writing outstanding quality material that brings people in via search.
Always visit and comment on other blogs, this is a great way to network and leveraging DropMyLink.com and BlogEngage to find other blogs to comment on and follow are great. However, don’t do it as a method for building your own site traffic/content, because the moment you stop the momentum you will lose that referral traffic faster than you can imagine. Leverage it as a networking tool and to gain a little more attention and notice, but SEO/SERP and content is truly king.
If you had to choose between doing 100 comments and 7,000 words (70 words per comment) or 14 500 word blog posts, I would choose doing the 14 500 word blog posts every time as being a better benefit to the site overall.
Another item, it is great to have blogs you love and follow, but for expanding your site influence, traffic, Alexa rating, you must comment on unique domains, only 1 backlink from the same domain ever counts for Alexa, and if you comment on the same sites you will only ever be seen by the same audience (generally) you need to keep expanding and reaching new audiences. As much as I like commenting on smaller blogs too (which I do), I got more referral traffic from 1 comment on Problogger.net than I did from commenting on 100 smaller blogs. So don’t rule out leaving a really useful and baiting comment on some of the big sites, you can get far more traffic than you think from them, comment early, the first people to comment get the most reads, nobody really reads comment #78 – #100 in a 200 comment articles, they read either the first few or last few mostly.
Agree, Disagree? Share your thoughts, I want to hear from you on your commenting strategies and what works, doesn’t and what you would or do actively do.
-Justin Germino
WPX Support
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