Blog Commenting For SEO: Commenting On Other Blogs Without Sabotaging Business Productivity

Agreed, commenting on other bloggers blog has immense benefits for your blog’s branding, traffic generation, marketing and more. However, you could be commenting on other blogs and starving your 3 core and critical online business activities of quality time. This post presents simple steps you can take to develop a productive SEO blog commenting strategy that fits your own purpose, time and online business development plan…

Effective Blog Commenting: Best Practices For SEO and Online Business Productivity

For a blogger, blog commenting (or commenting on other people’s blogs) is a powerful and fast method of build a community of your own loyal readers. Blog commenting advantage and benefits include: to expose a bloggers posts and articles to readers of the host blog (through the link placed at the end of the comments), thus drive blog traffic and build backlinks through blog commenting; increase Page Rank (PR); blog commenting also has SEO and marketing benefits (search engines love blogs with activities) and increase the bloggers’ personal brand.

Commenting on other blogs is one of the effective and easy ways to get other people to find your posts to willingly share them and vote for them in social media sites. Other reasons why bloggers comment on other blogs include: to learn new tips, read latest industry news and   network and build relationships with other bloggers.

Although blog commenting benefits are immense, commenting on blogs can be time consuming, and this could have a negative impact on the overall productivity of a business blogger. Sometimes, a blogger can get carried away in the fun of blog commenting.

Why Every Blogger Needs an Effective Blog Commenting Strategy

Today, I want to share with you some simple steps you can take to develop an SEO blog commenting strategy that fits your own purpose and online business development plan, so that you can be productive with when commenting on other blogs.

In a previous post, I shared the 3 core activities that make the most (80%) impact (income) in any online business but yet only constitute 20% of the entire scheme of things to do in any internet business. To find out what those 3 core online business activities are, click to read: How to Create a Wildly Productive Online Business.

In that post I shared that if you drastically increase your priority and time input on those 3 core activities (to 80%), you can significantly generate more income (because the small things can only but do small damage if you slack on them but the risk of slacking on the 3 big things is very high – low income generation, doing so much but achieving very small results).

If you look at those big 3 core activities we should be spending the most time on, you’d see that blog commenting falls under Traffic. But again it’s only one of the many traffic strategies you may be using, hoping that you have a written down or mind-mapped real life strategy in place for Generating Traffic to your blog.  It’s a good productivity tactics and also helps increase outputs.

A little digression here: if you are yet to develop your own blog traffic strategy, don’t sweat the small stuff – use these simple steps to have a traffic strategy in place:

  • List all the methods you already use/ know or plan to use to get more blog traffic, including blog commenting method;
  • Now go back to that list and assign days of the week you want to do each;
  • Go back to that list again and specify how long you want to spend on each activity in that list.

Now back to setting up a blog commenting strategy /plan, to ensure that you spend time on all 3 big core, divide planned daily business hours into 3, so that only one part is for doing traffic activities (including blog commenting). Remember, it’s only when you are productively doing all core activities to completion that you will get maximum results (bottom line is evidenced by steady/ increased income),

To ensure that you are not over-spending time on blog commenting and starving the other traffic generation methods (in your list) of your time, you will be developing your own personal blog commenting plan (monthly/ weekly, daily). That is the purpose of today’s post. Let’s quickly get to work – ensure you have your pen and paper or mind-map or notepad ready…. set…. go!

How To Do Blog Commenting Without Getting Drowned Under

Below is a blog commenting guide you can adapt or use “as is” to stay productive while commenting on other bloggers blogs so that you’ll every blog comment would be worth your time and deliver SEO benefits at the same time.

Below are 7 Steps to Developing Your Own Blog Commenting Strategy Plan:

  1. Blog Commenting Frequency: First decide whether your commenting on other blogs will be daily, twice a week, three times a week, 4 times a week. Remember, blog commenting should be a part of your overall blog traffic generation strategy.
  2. Daily (Total) Duration For Blog Traffic Generation: Next write down how many hours you will spend daily to work at generating traffic to your blog (all forms of traffic, including blog commenting);
  3. Planned Hours For Commenting: Of those hours, how many hours will be for blog commenting, daily;
  4. Blog Commenting Schedule: What will be your schedule for commenting on other blogs – How many days a week? What specific days? How much time (in total) will you spend any day you have to comment on other blogs – 1 hours, 2 hours, 30 minutes…?  What specific start and end time (is it 7am to 8am? 3pm to 3.30p.m…?)
  5. Blog Commenting Coverage: How many blogs will you comment on within your scheduled duration and time (1, 2, 3, 4, 5…)?
  6. Specific Blogs To Tour For The Week: List the blogs (by names and URLs) you want to tour for the next week’s blog commenting (suitable if you have blog commenting buddies or favorite list of blogs)? OR Do you want to click at random (suitable if you belong to a blog commenting tribe). *There are a couple of Blog Commenting Tribes on Facebook – some open and some on invite only. Just enter “tribe” in the search box of your Facebook window and you’ll see a list to choose from. Ensure to ‘Blogging Mastermind Comment Tribe’  founded by Dani Nir McGrath.
  7. Assign Blogs To Days and Times: Schedule your blog commenting plan/ calendar using any of these scheduling ‘to do’ tools: ReminderFox (firefox addon), evernote or RememberTheMilk.

What Are Your Thoughts?

There you have it, Productive Blog Commenting Plan.  It’s my desire that you put the above 7 steps to use for a more productive blog commenting.

What are the ways you currently use to manage your commenting on other bloggers blog, so that your core business activities do not get neglected?

I’d absolutely love to hear your own experiences and thoughts. Let’s meet at the comments area.

Share it! Don’t forget to tweet, Facebook, stumble, digg this post so your friends can also read it. Use the easy share buttons below.

 

Stella


45 replies on “Blog Commenting For SEO: Commenting On Other Blogs Without Sabotaging Business Productivity”

These seven guidelines are AWESOME Stella!

Anyone who applies these will radically enhance their commenting effectiveness. But most won’t, and the people who do can rejoice in this fact because you can bet your bottom dollar that the majority of their competitors don’t like work which means they don’t like procedures with lots of actions steps they need to take, which means they can see the answer to all their problems and not apply it at all.

This is same reason why you can lay your intricate business plan and marketing strategy out for everyone to see and not worry about being over run by copy cats. People are lazy. So lazy they won’t even act in their own best interest.

I imagine #4 on the list is where most people shoot themselves in the leg. They either A) Don’t answer the question, or B)They don’t put a time limit on how long they spend on each blog which 95% of the time leads to them either not covering all the blogs they wanted to or taking WAY longer than they intended to to cover them all, which completely throws off the rest of their schedule.

The way I fixed this was with a deadline. The deadline is the greatest invention to ever have come along because without it, nothing would get done. So I set a timer and I work to beat the deadline on each site I visit. E.ggtimer.com is one that works right in your browser if you don’t have a kitchen timer laying around the house.

I promise that once you start working to a deadline, you’ll wow yourself with how much more you accomplish in the time you have.

Yes its really super away to gain visitor with exposer too. I think its a all in on package. With blog commenting we able to get good Backlink and visitor too.
Thanks Stella for sharing this.

Good to see you, Amit. I agree, blog commenting is one of the best ways to expose your blog to a whole new audience (of other people) for free. Very effective for getting traffic and backlinks too.

Really after a long time i am on your site 🙂
BTW hope you are doing well stella. From now i will visit daily to read your super articles 🙂

I know, Amit – it’s been a while. I’m happy to see you’ve got a lot more posts and guest bloggers on your blog.

Keep up the good work and I look forward to seeing more of you.

I’m doing well – thanks for asking:)

I actually really like your idea to schedule the exact time to use to comment on blogs. Not only does it make a sort of appointment time for you to follow, but once you fulfill that time you know you have accomplished your goal, even if you did not finish quite as many as you’d hoped. The more you get into a routine on blog commenting, the easier it can be for you to have it just be another step in your work day. Plus, since you get to read other people’s blogs, it is almost like a break, depending on the blogs you are reading and commenting on. But no matter, this is a great strategy to keep up traffic and keep you focused on business. Is it better to comment on blogs that are within the sphere of your business, or does it matter?

Thanks for reading, Katie, and especially for taking the time to leave an awesome comment:)

I agree – blog commenting scheduling helps our “system” to get into the habit of commenting while at the same time ensuring that we don’t neglect other important business stuff.

In answer to your question – you can comment on any blog you fancy. However, when you comment more on blogs related to your business, you get more benefits such as: attract visitors who are your own target audience, establish relationship with the blog owners who you may collaborate with in the future (when the opportunity arises); you may even attract the attention of influencers in your market, who may mention you to their own wider audience (and that gets lots more traffic of potential buyers etc)…

It’s good if you already have a list of blogs where you can leave comments. If you have the time to check this, take note of the time when most comments arrive and schedule your comments during that time window.

— Ray

I like your suggestion, Ray, especially about making observing when the blogs in your list have the most comments come in. Very true – targeting to be one of the first commenters helps to attract more eyeballs to your blog link.

Thanks for your contribution:)

Well put Stella. It is important to have a plan when you decide to use blog commenting as an SEO strategy. It should not take most of your time and you can achieve excellent results as well as utilize your time well.

Stella,

What a great post!

I have a simple blog commenting plan: 3 blogs on a daily basis – before going to work.

I want to limit myself, because otherwise I would be spending too much time commenting and that’s everything I would do 🙂

Thanks Timo, Im glad you like the blog commenting plan guide.

I’m not surprised you already have a blog commenting plan and schedule. I would have been surprised if you didn’t have one – as a productivity maven, that you are:)

Hahha “…otherwise I would be spending too much time commenting and that’s everything I would do”. But that’s the point – else those “3 core online business activities” will suffer because there’s not enough time to do them.

I’m gonna read your new blog post – sounds enticing.

Stella,

Thank you 🙂

I wanted to add another tweak to my commenting strategy.

Since I tend to do my commenting at once, I want to get into it as quickly as possible. If I dedicate an hour to commenting, I want to decide which blogs/blog posts I want to comment – before I leave a comment the next day.

Every night before going to bed, I tend to mark those blogs I want to comment the next day with a star (in Google Reader – those blog posts which title I find interesting).

Eventually when I do my commenting, I look for those starred titles and I don’t have to start pondering what blogs to comment on. This saves my time and my energy.

Timo

Hi Timo:

I kind of like this your Google Reader twist to it, together with pre-planning it ahead and starring the blogs. I would want to try it out, as I usually use a notepad to do that and sometimes head to a Bloggers’ Facebook group and randomly find great posts..

Wow – always a new productivity twist from you – loved the Google reader commenting plan. Thanks, as always. You rock!

Wow. I really interested to your post. It is really impressive. You gave me a lot of information about it.

Thanks

Hey Stella: I really appreciated this post. It’s easy to get overwhelmed thinking of all the blogs in the world, and how many of them I’d like to cover. You’ve made the process much more manageable. Thanks! Susan

Hi Susan:
Good to see you around – it’s been a while. Thanks for reading and commenting – I appreciate it.

Yes, I agree with you about getting overwhelmed (and excited too) with blog commenting. That’s why I wrote that post because I had to work out a strategy to keep things manageable for me, and thought to share with my readers an example strategy I’m using, so that they can use it OR come up with one that will work for them.

You know, thinking of blog commenting, we as bloggers may forget to even comment back on our own commenters sites (to show appreciation and also build our own communities). With a blog commenting strategy, we can create our own goals and objectives we want to get out of commenting and have a list (like I’m making now) just to make sure that we comment where we learn Or where we build relationships OR where we build backlinks. Without a clear plan, we;re bound to do more of some than others.

Again, thanks for coming by. I’m curious to unravel what’s in your new blog post, so I’ll come read shortly:)

OH! I like the post and I would rather use and apply the following steps in order for me to have a successful and more productive business.

I definitely have an overall commenting strategy Stella but I definitely don’t have one as structured as you suggest. I’m sure that many people would benefit from being this structured and it may even be something that I should do but for me, setting a specific time or number of hours would take the fun out of it. Lots of times, I’ll have no intention of leaving a comment (for example now on this post) but I’ll come across an article that makes me think and next thing you know, I’m commenting.

Hi Sherryl:

Thanks for reading and taking the time to leave me a comment. I appreciate it greatly.

I’m so glad to know that you have an overall blog commenting strategy – never mind whether it’s structured or not. Once one gets the idea, the structure tends to stay more in the head. The idea is to get people to know that they should plan how to spend time moderately on commenting and also not starve other business activities of their time.

At first I would use my time-table, however, as time went on, one tends to consciously have an idea of not over-spending time on blog commenting, it can get addictive (lol). Sometimes I I also tend to do what you do – see an interesting post and quickly leave a comment, however, I still try to balance commenting with other things that are critical to be done.

Guess what Sherryl, we are thinking alike – I also wrote a post “5 Reasons to Have a Blog If you’re in Business”. I’m gonna check out yours right away (see, one of those times that commenting falls out of plan:) I hope to see you again on my blog, thanks for coming around.

Sounds like we have similar strategies. It’s probably the execution that’s different. Now that I think about it, I often do have a specific schedule for commenting -(if you count a post-it-note with the names of specific blogs that I intend to visit that day.) 🙂

Hi Sherryl:

Good to know that good strategies are generally the same, all round – from what I can see with your blog commenting strategy vs mine.

I also recently started compiling blog URLs of (i) my commenters and (i) other bloggers I network with – just to ensure that as my blog influence grows, I will not forget any blogger that shows me care via commenting, retweets etc.

Looks like we’ll learn a lot from each other, over time. Thanks for sharing your specific strategy – I appreciate your time to come over.

Cheers!

Your blog is owesome and it really helped me a lot…..

Nice article. I was checking constantly this blog and I’m quite impressed! Very useful information.Great Post and very good articles. You are doing very good job, keep posting articles. I will suggest all my friends to go this post. Thanks

great post! very informative blog. I’ll share this with my friends.

I think this is really good advice overall. One thing I would add however is that for some of us a rigid structure really doesn’t work, and we are liable to break it sooner rather than later. I think if you are someone who fits into that category, like myself, if might be better to set weekly goals rather than daily ones.

But then again….

Thanks for reading, Jonathan and for your comment.

That depends on what the person wants actually and what you define as your bottomline as success. Doing business for PROFITS means forcing ourselves to be disciplined to do what is in the interest of our business. Even waking up early is not comfortable, time to go to work is not and in every successful business (on/offline) there are SYSTEMS and time for doing every single thing.

Now if you have 2 hours (example) daily to work your blog, which is only and only a part of your income generation business online, you have to divide that time to touch different activities (say, 20 minutes for promoting posts on social sites, 20 minutes for commenting on other blogs, 40 minutes for creating a new post, 20 minutes for responding to social mentions and interacting with social media followers and 20 minutes for creating part of an affiliate marketing content).

If you take your blogging as a business, you have to be disciplined about your time use for productivity – comment on some blogs today, comment on others tomorrow. I know it’s hard but it’s a good practice to get used to and once in a while you’ll stretch a little on some activities. I suggest you read my latest blog post on how to avoid common business blunders and avoid taking your business as a hobby.

Working in any office, there are structures and that is why they succeed – someone who doesn’t like structures gets hired as a staff in a structured business and still follows a structure. The whole idea of posts like this is to structure your online business and blog for productivity and success – doing what we feel like how long we feel like does not contribute to making us successful EXCEPT we are building a HOBBY BLOG. The Gurus and top bloggers follow structure and only when they have completed the activities for he day that they use available extra time for activities they want to spend more time on.

Only 3% are doing things in a structured way, that’s why every year 97% is reported to just be online blogging and for online business and not making any progress or income.

Even I, am not perfect on this, however that is how I work my offline and online business and sometimes I slack and every time I first complete ‘what must be done’ before ‘indulging’ on others, I see sales. Note that every post I write here is my personal online business plan that I am sharing to help others organize their business.

It’s all about what your main outlook is in business – profit or hobby or nothing. Always ask, is spending 1 hour doing traffic and zero minutes/ hours building a list – is it going to make the business profitable? Let’s follow what the successful are doing and how too – to be part of the 3% – it’s not always comfortable, Jon. Let me know your thoughts.

Hello!

I totally *get* what you are saying,
Stella, and I don’t disagree with it at all, however, I do think there is room for some degree of personalization.

For instance, while it may make perfect sense to commit to commenting on a certain number of blogs, or for a certain amount of time, does it always have to be a daily schedule?

For instance, if you were to schedule an hour per day for blog commenting, could you not alternatively schedule five hour per week? It still has the same goal, but it allows for a higher degree of freedom.

I think freedom is exceptionally key here. Many people who set off down the blogging path with an idea they want to turn it into a business, or at least part of a business, do it because they felt strangled by the corporate world. In short, they are artists at heart. I think for these people, being too rigid in their scheduling could actually hurt them rather than help them.

And some activities such as writing, can be very tricky to schedule. I write as the inspiration hits me, if I wait until the scheduled time, I might lose my thought, and I don’t want to do that.

I remember this was something that happened in elementary school a lot. Yes there would be daily tasks that needed to get done, but there were other projects in which students were given a week, or two weeks to complete them. It didn’t matter to the teacher when they worked on them, as long as it was done within the two weeks.

I hope I am managing to make it clear that I completely agree with you in principle, there has to be some kind of a plan, and a commitment. I’m just throwing my two cents in to suggest that for some tasks, and some people, a weekly schedule can work just as well. I think you really excel at giving people the nitty gritty, the details, and I’ve said that before. You share the information a lot of bloggers would veil under vague “concepts” or suggestions, and I appreciate that. I suppose in part my argument, if you can call it that, is my way of not saying just “nice post”/

🙂

Hey Jon, sure – by all means.

Sorry if I misunderstood you:) I also mentioned it (maybe in the second of that blog commenting strategy series) – I said it can be personalized by a reader. What I did was a guide that anyone can customize for their own use – not a rigid thing.

Oh no, it can be weekly or twice a week -entirely dependent on your schedule. The important thing is have a plan and schedule so that your other blogging / business activities also feel your impact. The idea behind the post was for readers to ensure that commenting is not taking the time for other activities.

You’re right about getting burst of ideas at odd hours. That happens to me too, I guess everyone – but I try to also get flexible to ‘pay back’ time on an activity that I spent its own allocated time – just to ensure the work is done. We’re on the same point – set a timeline (like your elementary school story) and goals. Sometimes I find myself writing long on hours and eat in to other tasks time but because I set a mindset to do the other stuff too, I tend to re-schedule and complete them.

You’re on point Jonathan, I guess we misunderstood each other – I’m sorry if I mis-communicated that the blog commenting schedule was a guide that can be customized to suit you. The whole idea is to set a mindset that other things also need to be done. I also re-schedule to go on weekly plans like when I am doing batch content writing for articles or blog posts. Are we happy now?

Thanks for taking the time to put your s cents down – I like that, and appreciate it. Not everyone would have bothered and I appreciate that you came back to clear things up, but they are not vague concepts you know. I’m a project manager and project management concepts are not vague – they work. Lol

Working on your stuff and will send off to you tomorrow (Monday).

Cool Jonathan:) Thanks

It’s always a pleasure seeing you around. Enjoy your day:)

Stella,
Your outline is going to save me valuable time! I have been needing to comment more often but continue to procrastinate because it is a time suck. Thanks for helping nudge me to get my time organized and finally begin a commenting schedule!

Hey Carissa – I’m so glad that I could help you (with this post) towards organizing your blog commenting activities around a productive schedule.

You’re right, while blog commenting has great benefits, without care one may indulge in it to the detriment of other critical business or blogging “to do” tasks, and that’s not good.

Just read your post on sites you visit most and I found 2 that I hate to say I’m fighting hard to stay away from WordPress Dashboard and ‘People’. lol

Thanks Jeanine for coming around reading and commenting. I appreciate greatly.

The essence of a blog commenting plan is efficiency and maximum business
output.

As long as you have a blog commenting plan that works for you, and doen not interfere with eating into the time for other business activities, that’s fine. Some people, may be like you, have a natural clock in their brain that keeps them organized and efficient.

Some people just (me inclusive) like to use a sort of planners.

*I kind of think this ’10-30′ part of your ‘dressing my truth’ stuff is easier than the 6 outfits- 30 days; more outfits to mix and match.

For some reason, the idea of scheduling days to comment on blogs makes me feel overwhelmed. In fact, it never seems to work when I break things up by days of the week.

Maybe I’m not good with that much structure?

But what does seem to work is having a plan for what to do each day: this first, then this, then this. The only problem with that is that I don’t get everything on the list done and with no rotation, some things get neglected consistently.

I’ll have to rethink my plan. Thanks for the advice, Stella!

Great post!!

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