The significance of leaving comments on other blogs

Feb 04, 2008

A big reason — it is one of the many reasons — that I fail to generate decent traffic for my blogs is that I rarely leave comments on other blogs. I don’t know if it is some kind of a mental block or lack of time. I think it is lack of time because in order to leave a credible comment you not only have to read the post very carefully you must also know what you’re talking about. I never have enough time to read the other blog posts carefully. Today when I left a comment on Muhammad’s post at Problogger.net I had decided to write a small post on the benefits of living good comments on other blogs.

Although a majority of people leave comments on other blogs merely to generate traffic this is not a good policy even if you are leaving comments merely to generate traffic. You should mostly participate in the comments section if you have something really solid to say, if you can really push the ongoing discussion forward and have got some valuable input to give. It is not your comment that gets you traffic, it is the quality of your comment. If people are impressed by what you have written in your comment they are more prone to visiting your blog to know further about you. By “impressed” I don’t mean to imply that you go on impressing people and do nothing else and then get too obsessive about the whole idea of creating the right impression. I just mean to say be a productive participant. Even if you’re just goofing around goof around in a good manner so that it doesn’t seem that you are leaving your comment just for the sake of leaving your link there. Given below are some benefits of leaving good comments on other blogs:

You can leave your link their

OK, this sounds like a sinister reason for leaving comments but nonetheless it is a great benefit. There is a thing called “links juice”. I have no idea what it means but some bloggers let you get SEO benefits when you leave comments on the blogs and some bloggers don’t allow it for obvious reasons. Even if you don’t get any SEO benefit you can derive, gradually, great amount of traffic from these links.

You can increase your network

Personally I think this is the greatest benefit of leaving comments on other blogs. When you leave comments you begin to interact with bloggers and their readers. Many people, slowly, blog by blog, begin to know you and start frequenting your blog. when they frequent your blog there is a greater chance that they will link to you and subscribe to your RSS feeds. This builds up your traffic not only from other websites and blogs but also from the search engines.

Commenting broadens your perspective and you get more ideas to write about on your blog

Lots of interesting stuff happens in the comments section. In fact sometimes the real exchange of ideas happens in the comments section and not in the blog post. You get to read different opinions on the same topic and this way it helps you view the same thing from different angles and attain a broader perspective, consequently increasing your sphere of knowledge and wisdom.

These are a few things that I can quickly think of at this moment. Can you think of any other benefits of leaving good comments on other blogs?