Today, in an effort to increase get at least some traffic to a new blog that I’ve just started, I decided to test blog commenting as a traffic strategy to see what happens. But something else cool happened; during the process I also figured out how to get “do-follow” backlinks, for free.
And to my surprise, its ridiculously simple.
Let me make this whole thing really easy for you.
The blog commenting thing isn’t just about the amount of traffic you get. There are bigger things at play, which I’ll get into on another post. We gotta put in the donkey work now to reap the rewards later on.
And listen, an added bonus of blog commenting is that search engines count them as a kind of vote for your site. Those valuable links are gonna benefit the search engine position of your site for years to come.
This is something I used to do way back in the early days of Web 2.0, but totally forgot about it until recently until I was reminded about it by one of my favourite bloggers, Ryan from Blogging from Paradise, who is a strong proponent of the strategy.
So I figured I’d try it out on a a brand new blog, and share what I’ve learned with you guys.
So you drive traffic like this:
You post an outstanding comment on a relevant blog in the hope that people will find it so riveting they simply must learn more about the intriguing person that posted it.
It’s a solid theory, but the actual amount of traffic you can gain is unpredictable. In most instances you’re effectively competing with other people who have the exact same idea as you, so if anything don’t become too dependant on this strategy and mix things up a bit with other sources.
But the “do-follow” backlinks are kinda nice. And even “no-follow” links are cool too, so don’t ignore them.
In either case, the quality of your comment needs to be brilliant.
So no “hey man, great post” one-liners. This means you gotta actually READ the blog post, and figure out something the author has missed, or find a unique perspective, or add something of value.
Your comment has gotta be at least a paragraph in length, and use your actual name – the aim is to be as human as possible. There’s a lotta nasty spam bots out there making life difficult for us, so raise the bar way above them. Don’t post under your brand name.
This will help the blog owner know that you’re legit.
Look to connect with blogs that SHARE THE SAME VALUES as you, instead of posting on any old site just because they’ve got buku traffic. This helps to make sure the new visitors you attract have similar values to you, so they’ll likely stick around.
How you treat the comment section of blogs is also important. You should be viewing these as small communities, and treat them as such.
This means building relationships, being respectful, and contributing something positive.
Finding Do-Follow Blogs
So how do you find do-follow blogs to comment on?
That’s the easy bit. There’s even a free tool that you can use, which I’ll tell you about in a minute.
But first, because I don’t want you to become too dependant on software or apps, I’m going to teach you how to find all the blogs you’ll ever need manually, so your education with Profit Copilot is future-proofed.
For this you’re gonna need a search engine, and the Big G will do just fine.
Here we’re gonna use a boolean search string. Sounds complicated, it’s not really, all you gotta do is copy & paste, and make a minor change to the query.
Let’s pretend that your blog is all about Blue Widgets, and you wanna find some do-follow blogs to comment on.
In that instance, you’d use this string:
Blue Widgets “Notify me of follow-up comments?”+”Submit the word you see below:”
Simple, right? There are loads of strings you can use.
To find WordPress blogs in your niche that accept comments, you’d use:
Blue Widgets “no comments posted yet”
For ExpressEngine blogs:
blue widgets “powered by expressionengine” “post a comment”
These are a great starting point, but if you want to delve deeper into the world of boolean strings, for blog commenting, then here’s the tool I mentioned earlier.
It’s a website called Drop My Link. You gotta subscribe to the mailing list to use it properly, but it seems to be run by a decent guy who isn’t trying to pitch you one crap offer after another.
You just put in a keyword or a niche, choose what kind of backlinks you’d like, and it will take you to a Google search results page of full of relevant sites that allow you to publish comments.
It’s a massive time saver.
So, to sum up, your take away should be:
- Use boolean search strings to find blogs
- Treat the comment section the same as any other community
- Make high quality and positive contributions
Hopefully you now have a solid strategy you can use to get do-follow links to your blog, and a bit more traffic along the way.