The Importance of Commenting on Other Blogs

I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but ‘Blogging is a conversation’.

I’m not sure who should be credited with originally saying that (if you know, leave me a comment!), but it’s without doubt, the best definition of blogging that I’ve seen. Blogging is a conversation, as a blogger, we carefully craft our posts each day to express our thoughts and interact with our readers… and as a reader, interaction gets you involved, and we all love those warm fuzzy feelings that go along with being a part of something. Commenting lets you interact with both the blogger and the other readers, it lets you become an important part of a conversation, and that’s good!

As a blogger, you also have a few other reasons why you should want to comment on other blogs, and they are key parts in helping to promote your own. Here are some benefits:

• You’ll get a chance to develop a relationship with that blogger - building a network of bloggers in your niche will help you all stimulate conversations… as a few people start to comment on your posts, more of your readers will gradually join in - this is a key growth indicator for any blog. You also may find opportunities to collaborate with some of these other bloggers down the track.
• You’ll get to interact with other readers of those blogs - if your comments add quality to the conversation, the readers of that blog may want to interact with you… some will click through to your blog - at the very least, they get exposed to your brand/name.

Set a strategy for your comments

To get the most out of commenting, you should settle on a few goals and establish a strategy to achieve them… here are a couple of things that I think you should keep in mind.

• If your goal is to get noticed by the blogger and develop a relationship, then your easiest targets will be those blogging on similar topics to you, and with blogs about the same level of popularity of yours (or less)… chasing prominent bloggers, or ones with little interest in what you’re blogging about will take a lot more convincing that you’re someone they should be interacting with.
• If your goal is to promote your brand and get some visitors to your blog, then make sure the readers of the blog you’re commenting on will also be interested in what you’re blogging about. You’ll also want to direct a lot of your discussion towards other comments that have already been made… don’t get lost in the crowd of ‘love this post’ comments, develop the conversation and add your opinions.

As a general rule, the more popular a blogger (or the blog) is, the more effort you’ll need to put into commenting to achieve your goals. Getting the attention of a new blogger who rarely gets any comments on his posts should be pretty easy (it may just take the one comment), but if every blog post gets many comments, then you’ll need to stand above the crowd in both quality and quantity.

I suggest you concentrate on blogs in batches - identify some likely candidates and make a commitment to comment on as many of their posts as possible over a period of say two weeks (adjust up or down depending on the popularity of the blog). Try to make sure that you are adding to the conversation, quality is more important than quantity, and if possible try to stimulate the conversation by asking other questions or giving honest opinions.

Commenting on other blogs is a powerful tool as it opens so many opportunities. Consider making it part of your daily routine and set yourself some targets - identify the blogs you want to interact with and join the conversation.

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