Importance Of Related Commenting

Guest article by Mr.Soumen Halder from Ampercent. This is a gift for all our readers on account of our 3rd anniversary celebrations.

Commenting has been a very common approach towards getting your brand (read blog) recognized in your niche. It also serves a greater purpose of bringing interested readers to your blog. However, if you put a little more insight into commenting, this can be more productive and beneficial. Read this post from a blogger’s perspective as commenting is also done by readers and I am afraid this post may help any of them (read just a blog reader) in their future comments.

A few words before we start

Prior to the definition of Related Commenting, let me say a few words about commenting. It is a well-known practice among bloggers. We read a blog post, find it interesting (or disgusting) and we leave a message to the author in reply to the post letting him know our views about it. Sometimes they (the comments) also contain links which we find useful. Comments also serve as the medium to relate with other commenter as well as the author.

On the other hand, it is the easiest way to scatter your URL all around. Moreover if you are lucky enough you may end up getting dofollow backlinks which serve great in optimizing your blog for the search engines. But in case they don’t, you can earn visitors from them and that is what related commenting is all about.

Let’s Roll

As the name suggests, related commenting is somewhat similar to commenting and yet has some dissimilarities when compared to it. We are talking about proximity and anti-proximity at the same time. So here is how I define it,

Related Commenting is commenting with relevant resources from your blog that adds value to the post it is placed.

You have to put in some extra effort into commenting to yield even better results. Whenever we gallop through our feeds, tweets or any source of information that we follow, we certainly come across dozen of posts that are worth commenting. And that is when we express our views about them. Now there are times when we come across certain topics that we ourselves have covered or at least covered something relevant. Here is how we are going to gain from these situations using Related Commenting.

How can I use it as a strategy?

It is true that tweets, feeds etc are enough to find good posts to comment on. But as I have said earlier we are going to put in some extra effort into this, and so I will be using a simple technique to demonstrate it.

Let us consider you make a post on any topic. Go on and search the same phrase on Google. Google will enlist some links and some of them may be relevant to your post. Open the (relevant) links one at a time and read the post to have an idea about it. Now you can talk a little about what the author missed (or something that needs more explanation) and place a link to your post that has it.

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Let’s say you have an article on “11 things you need to check before you publish an article”. Google it. You have a post from XYZ blog that discusses “10 Steps To Write A Great Post”. Open it and read it. There will be points you haven’t discussed as well as points you have and he hasn’t. Emphasize how benefited you are and be honest. There’s no harm in giving people credit. Now its time you talk about what he had missed and why that is important. After completing, you can insert the link to the resource where the (missing) point is elaborated. Let’s suppose he had talked about inserting compelling elements as a tip but had not discussed about writing a good title which you have explained in your post. Here is how you can put a comment:

Hey author-name, you have put in perfectly how a compelling content can engage readers. But isn’t a good title also necessary to get eyeballs? I think a post title also needs to be intriguing as it acts like a one-line-intro for your posts. Read more on this here (hyperlink to your article).

NOTE: You can also search using relevant phrases  like “How to write engaging content” to make the search.

How is it going to help me?

1. Traffic: Let me talk some sense here; we bloggers really love traffic swarming in from all directions. Related Commenting is equally potent as Commenting (if not more) in getting attention to your blog.

2. Building Relations: This is again similar to Commenting; it does create positive vibes in reader minds (only if you don’t misuse it). If you can deliver quality, the visitor is going to stick to you.

3. Branding: It is a well known process to let people know about your brand as I explained Commenting as the easiest way to scatter your URL.

4. Do Follow Backlinks: As I had mentioned earlier, if you are lucky you can find some blogs that give dofollow backlinks in their comment section. Thus you can get traffic as well as a vote for search engines.

5. Earn Due Credit for Your Posts: There are times you write a post after a lot of research but somehow it does not perform as expected. There can be many reasons for that. It can be a bad SEO or high competition niche. In situations like this Related Commenting can bring you exposure.

6. Promotion: Earn some applause for any newly launched service using Related Commenting. Look out for posts that cover similar services. Show up there and introduce your service with a link to the website.

Last but not the least

Like everything else this also needs practice and your command over the language. The more compelling your comment is, the more it is likely to bring result (read traffic). I know there can be much better comment than that I used as an example and like I said before, everybody needs practice to lure people into their blog. Now the most important questions one should ask himself/herself before posting links are,

#1. How good is your post as a resource? Does it add any value to the post you are commenting? If not, avoid commenting there.
#2. Do not include irrelevant links in your comments just because you think they are good. If they add no value, they are worthless.
#3. Are you stuffing lots of links? Are you spamming? Everybody hates spam and if misused, Related Commenting can be treated similarly which is perfectly alright. If you think there are more than one link that is similar to the post you are commenting, just post only one (or max two) which is (or are) closest to the topic. If by any chance you manage to escape the eyes of the comment moderator (also the Akismet spam checker) and your spam comment gets posted, sooner or later somebody is going to read your post and give a disheartened feedback which is surely going to hurt your brand.
#4. Where are you posting? The reputation of the blog you are commenting also counts. You should try to post comments on blogs that have authority (influence) which is enough to get exposure but not sufficient to outrun your brand’s authority totally.

So while you are practicing this be sure you have a very informative post or atleast more informative than the post you are commenting on. Finally, thanks for being patient enough to stick with me till this line. Happy blogging!!!

Tagged as: Blogging, Commenting, Internet, SEO, Tips and Tricks, Tutorials