The Importance of Commenting on Other Blogs

Posted by Martin Jamieson | June 19, 2008 .

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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3 Comments so far

Mushfiqur Rahman June 24, 2008 2:12 am

You are so right Martin. Today’s bloggers have forgotten what it really means to be a blogger, that is, sharing your thoughts and opinions with others. The majority who leave a comment, do so to increase their backlink, and hence leave something that is pretty useless. Plus, many people read the article but don’t bother to leave back a comment. And those who do have the intention to spam your blog with worthless links to porn/viagara sites.

Anyway, keep up the good work! Your site is going straight to my bookmarks foler. :-)
Martin Jamieson June 24, 2008 6:33 am

Thanks Mushfiqur, the number of spam comments, even for relatively new blogs are just insane at times… do they really think they are going to get published, there are hardly any blogs today without some form of comments moderation, yet we still get swamped by it… I guess there are still enough out there without it for it to be worth their time (unfortunately).

Comments are an essential part of communication for a blog… just to highlight one of the benefits - I’ve just now visited Mushfiqur’s blog (very good btw) and left a comment on his latest article too… it would have taken me a lot longer to find it had he not introduced himself here first.
Mushfiqur Rahman June 24, 2008 10:27 pm

Its because there is an automated bot hitting every blog. Just leave it on and it does the job. You’d be surprised to see so many unmoderated web blogs out there. I say, at least use Akismet, its free and comes with every Wordpress package.

I also handpick my comments