Not Your Grandma’s Traffic Strategy

You probably already know that commenting on other people’s blogs has a big benefit associated with it: SEO! The more incoming links you generate, the more it helps towards increasing the PageRank of your site. Which means your site shows up higher on Google for your keywords.

But what you won’t hear anyone tell you, is there is another HUGE benefit from doing this: Incredibly Warm & Targeted Free Traffic!

No, this is not the same kind of free traffic as what you would get from a “exit popup” that pops up on a totally un-related, made-for-adsense or “pimped out with affiliate ads” web site. You know the one I’m talking about – where the entire existence of the web site is do drive affiliate traffic for high paying keywords – especially, with the most popular trend in the IM niche being “review web sites” that drive affiliate traffic during these big “guru” launches. But more on that another day 🙂

For now, let’s talk about the high quality of traffic you can get from commenting on the right blogs – blogs that are very popular in your niche (or related to your niche), blogs that are written by trusted and respected folks (think Seth Godin, Brian Clark), blogs that have a rabid fan following and massive readership (think Shoemoney, John Chow).

Remember: This is not about SEO. This is about using commenting strategies to generate warm, targeted leads for your business

Imagine getting hundreds of free clicks to your web site from a blog that is in the same (or related) niche as your site. Wonderfully warm traffic, from people who are really curious and interested in knowing more about your offer, rather than someone who got tricked into visiting your site.

HUGE difference.

I could write an entire ebook just about how to use “Commenting” on blogs & forums to get incredibly warm free traffic, that will result in a very high conversion rate for your sales copy. But no time to write an ebook today :-).

I will be going into more details about these strategies in forthcoming posts, but let’s stick to the bullet points for now.

Generating Leads By Commenting

As big product launches become more and more frequent and popular, you will see more businesses and product owners doing such “slingshot” launches, where a lot of focus, attention, money and effort is put into driving a large amount of traffic to a site within a short amount of time (usually between 1-2 weeks max). So don’t forget to comment on launch blogs.
Always leave comments that are very detailed, very relevant, and totally in context. I would even say, write up a mini blog post right there within the comments section. The more you make sense to the other readers, the more traffic you will generate.
It’s almost like you have one single comment to say something smart, something witty, funny, intelligent, something that advances the discussion, something that will simply make everyone want to know more about you by clicking on your name (which is usually linked to your web site).
Observe other comments and make sure that the names are actually linked to the commenter’s web site. If you don’t see anyone’s name being linked, then maybe the host doesn’t allow it. See if someone else has left a link in their signature.
So don’t forget to leave relevant do it during the “guru” launches, but don’t forget to to it for your main niche-related product launches.
If you are serious about your e-business, then you already know who the experts are in your niche. Participate in their forums more often, and piggy-back off their reputation and their traffic. You are basically getting to ride their coat-tails in building your reputation on their blog. So make sure you say something relevant and smart.
Comment early, comment often. Don’t wait for a few days until the blog comments have built up. Most blog comments are “first-come, first-shown”. So the early commenters get the most readers.
Have you successfully used a product that would be of great help to others in the same niche as yours? Example: In the IM niche, telling this to someone: “If you are in the market for an autoresponder system, and if you’re looking at Aweber, then you’re better off signing up with Profollow.com . This is Jeff Walker’s private label of Aweber, and is basically the exact same service, but priced much lower than Aweber.” (this may not be true for very long, of course, because from what I heard, Aweber is forcing Jeff W to increase his pricing too).
Do you have a special tip for others in your niche that you could leave as a comment in a relevant discussion on someone else’s blog? Like… “Most autoresponder services charge a “per subscriber” rate. And this count also includes people who have previously unsubscribed from your list. So you’re basically paying for useless emails. So be sure to completely delete unsubscribed users from your list. In some cases, if the count of unsubscribes is large, then you may have to get the autoresponder folks to do this for you”.

If you have other commenting tips or suggestions, feel free to comment below 😉

– Ravi Jayagopal