Leverage by Commenting on Relevant Blogs (Part 2)

You have an opinion, like participating in discussions, and debating seems a way of life for you then you can use the power of leveraging by commenting on various relevant blogs.

These powerful words will get your website or blog noticed in a crowded blogosphere, get you noticed as an active participant (nobody likes a dull boy), add to your credibility as an expert in your domain, and get you additional links that will point back to your domain.

For those who have not read Part 1 of this series please do so NOW! This blog post is a continuation to the Leverage by Commenting series.

We have already covered in Part 1:

1. Choose relevant blogs
2. Choose relevant bloggers
3. Choose prominent blogs

For those of you who have read Part 1, let’s continue our journey to find out which blogs to track, which ones to leave comments on, and which ones will form part of your overall SEO strategy.
4. Check for Comments

Another thing you could check is the number of comments which are being left on the blog. Are the comments useful and informative, or are the comments useless like “great work”, “thanks for the info” or worse “check my link so and so for more info”.

Useless comments that don’t add any value to the article or blog post but just for the purpose of creating a link won’t work. Most bloggers are intelligent enough to figure out link building ploys like this and will delete your link and comments.

Bloggers like it when their readers leave comments that are meaningful, praise their hard work, and even when they leave a negative comment but with justification. If you are pointing out a correction make sure you give credible reasons and references to your comment.

Good bloggers don’t mind being wrong, or being corrected, in fact they may appreciate being corrected and will carry a correction blog highlighting the mistake they made and the person who pointed it out.

An important note here! Check to see if the blogger is replying back to all the comments in a positive and fair way. Stay away from highly opinionated bloggers who think they know it all will probably not let you leave you valuable inputs anyways.

Does the blogger leave external links in the comments field? If so that’s good. Follow those links to see how the commenter has added value to the topic. Understanding the mind of the blogger is important and so are the rules he sets. After all he is the master of his blog.

5. Ask other bloggers

The good ol’ word of mouth works best. Check to see how many other prominent bloggers have linked to the blog. You can do this by checking the blog’s authority on Technorati.

Blog authority tells you how many other blogs have linked to the blog you are researching. So if you see a blog authority of 5, that’s means, 5 other blogs have linked to this blog. It would be a good thing if at this time you check to see why the other bloggers have linked to this blog.

Check to see if the blogger is promoting his blog. Read Get your Blog Noticed Part 1 and Part 2 to know more about ways in which blogs are promoted.

6. Make Friends (Most Important)

The profile page will also list the bloggers other interests and passions so check if there is some synergy there with your interests. Having similar interests is the best way to grow a friendship. Please don’t fake your interests for the sole reason of pursuing your SEO objectives, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

Does the blogger have a good sense of humor? Everyone likes someone who can add dash of humor and fun to their writing while being informative. Even though it may not be an important point to consider, personally I like anyone who can bring a smile to my face.

Make friends and grow your network. A blogger offers you his community of readers built after much hard work. Treat the blogger and his community of readers with respect, and they will give you a vault of information, ideas, assistance and traffic. Join in and have fun with your new online friends.

7. Make a Commitment

Once you have chosen the blogs you plan to read, track and to leave comments on, the next step for you is to be regular and committed. Read all the blog posts from your chosen blogs and leave comments when you have something valuable and positive to say.

An easy way to catch up on your favorite blogs is to subscribe to their RSS feeds. You can set up an iGoogle account to scan through your blogs for new stories, or use other feed services like FeedBurner.

I repeat don’t leave useless comments like “good work”, or “thank you for the post”. The blogger is working with certain objectives in mind and loves to blog; he does not need your thanks to continue.

Also don’t leave useless comments purely for the purpose of link building. Having hundreds of useless comments on various blog sites won’t add real value to your SEO link campaign and you will piss of bloggers and their readers in no time (Bloggers will delete your comments eventually making it waste of your time at the end of the day).

The key to leveraging on comments is to make each one count. Add further value to what’s being written, or to the discussion, that should be your mantra.

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Get your website reviewed by prominent Bloggers

A large part of off-page SEO strategies revolve around link building, directory submissions, article submissions, social bookmarking, vertical engines submissions and blogger reviews.

While blogger reviews may not have made it into mainline internet marketing strategies for companies in India as of yet, it is slowly becoming an important marketing strategy that SEO experts are adopting to achieve higher rankings in search engine results for their clients.

The main reason is that getting links from established, well promoted and high profile bloggers to your website, and to certain important pages of your website (i.e. deep linking) gives you permanent one-way links to the inner pages of your content.

Link building within relevant content (to the inner pages of your website) is great for search engine rankings and building quality links. Any SEO expert will vouch how difficult it is to achieve that with only directory submissions and other forms of link building.

Well established bloggers have built a reputation and readership over the years, and their readers trust their reviews and opinions. Getting an honest review of your products and services from such bloggers will give your website instant credibility amongst their readers in addition to build permanent one way links to your website.

What’s important to note is the word “honest review”. Don’t expect the blogger to write some fantastical review about a product or service that’s not up to the mark. Most bloggers value their credibility built over years, and will not damage it for one review.

When a blogger endorses or reviews a product or service, they are in fact telling their readers that they have tried the product, or used the service and give their honest opinion about it.

This stamp of approval (and sometimes even a critical comment) from an established blogger will get the traffic to your product, service or website.

If you do get a critical comment from a blogger who is reviewing your product or service, ensure that you answer that comment immediately. This lets the bloggers readers know that you are interested in enhancing your product and service and value suggestions to improve the same.

Later on you can let that blogger and his readers know that you have implemented that suggestion. Can you see how this could go a long way in building your credibility and business online?

All marketers will agree that there is no better marketing strategy than the good ol’ word-of-mouth, and in the online business it no different.

While selecting a blogger to review your product or services:

1. Ensure that the blogger is well established (blogging for atleast a year)

2. Check the Page Rank for the Blog (atleast 2 or above is good.

3. Ask to check the hits report or Google Analytics report for the blog

4. What is the profile of people who visit the blog? Would this TG (Target Audience) be interested in knowing more about your products and services?

5. Read through the blogger last few posts, the quality of his writing, and the time gap between the posts. Check for consistency, good style of writing and passion.

6. Check to see if readers are leaving behind intelligent comments, and if the blogger is replying satisfactorily to those immediately.

At the end of the day, Bloggers are consumers themselves and like reviewing and giving their opinions about brands, products and services they like or dislike. Bloggers are humans and feel and think like you, so build a relationship that’s not based on link building.

And lastly, always do a follow up with the bloggers within a month and ask them how you can be of help to them and their readers. Many bloggers may just tell you what they are looking for, and be willing to give credit to the source of information.

Also read:

Get you blog noticed Part 1 and Part 2
My love and Hate Relationship with Blogging
Why Search Engines loves blogs! And so should you
The Bloggers Survival Guide

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The Blogger’s Guide to Survival

What will it take for a blogger to survive the uncertain future ahead?

Any avid blogger will tell you that blogging is very hard work, and there have been cases where bloggers have admitted to letting blogging disrupt their family life, friendships in the real world, finances and time.

I am not a fan of extreme behavior. But I do admire some of the reasons they give – one of my favorites is that blogging is not just about writing or sharing, but the enormous satisfaction one gets being an active participant in exploring human experiences, knowledge, emotions and passions.

Let’s take a trip into time, back to the early hay days of the Internet. You had to pay for everything; set up of the website, hosting, server managed services, email accounts, and promoting your website. Other than that one needed the services of costly website developers to change a line of text, or a simple graphic.

It was little wonder that only companies could afford these exorbitant rates, leaving individuals and many professionals as passive participants, who could view, compare, give feedback, or buy.

Today the individual has the power to be active participants on the Internet with blogs, social bookmarking and social networking becoming commonly used terminology by college students, innovative brands and even large organizations.

Blogging gave the individual the power to create attractive pages of content with pictures, videos, and share it with the world on click of a button.

The present seems secure enough, and thousands of new blogs are being created each day, the numbers of users reading blog are on the rise, bloggers have started making a modest sum for their hard work, and popular blogs are ranking well in search engine results.

But what’s sad is that 90 percent of them will witness a sad demise because of simple things they did not know (not did not do) when they started blogging. Around 8percent of blogs will never be read, and 1 percent will give up after a year of hard struggle. Well that leaves 1 percent of blogs that will have any hope for survival, let alone success.

Now I am not trying to discourage anyone from blogging, its most fulfilling, but rather asking you to look within to see the reason why you want to blog and about what? Answering those questions could mean the difference between success or the demise of your blog.

In the animal kingdom, it’s the survival of the fittest.

In blogging it’s the most persistent, innovative and passionate bloggers that will survive. It will not be just what you do, but what you feel, and how you perceive the world you so write about that will make the difference.

Great Tips for blogger survival:

1. Write about something you know, and are passionate about. After all you will not want to write 3-5 times a week on a subject that you are unfamiliar with, or are not passionate about.

2. Add your complete profile with a nice photograph. Readers like to know a little about you.

3. Be persistent, your readers expect something new each time they visit.

4. It’s not about quantity, but quality. Write clean good copy,and use humor and examples with nice visuals.

5. Innovate, don’t give the same content rehashed, do things differently.

6. Make your blog customized, attractive and easy to navigate.

7. Add a search to your blog.

8. Allows your readers to interact with your blog (polls, comments, social bookmarking).

9.Your readers are your customer’s; get to know their likes and dislikes, pay attention to their comments.

10. Create links within your blog posts to your other blog posts.

11. Create links from your blog post to your website (if you have one)and from your website to your blog.

12. Build links from other blogs and popular websites to your blog.

13. Register your blog on blog search engines and blog directories.

14. Announce your blog to the world on press release sites.

15. Submit your blog posts to popular article submission sites. Don’t overdo it.

16. Register your blog feed (Atom/ RSS) with content feed syndicates.

17. Track the visitors on your blog using services like Google Analytics.

18. Monitize your blog with adwords and select affiliates that adds value for your readers.

19. Track and read other blogs in competition with you. What are they doing different?

20. Track the most popular blogs, see what they are doing (how often are they posting, the titles, the quality of content, do they use graphics and videos, do they allow users to leave comments and rank posts etc).

21. Leave interesting comments for other bloggers

21. Read Get you blog noticed.

22. Read My love and Hate Relationship with Blogging.

23. Read Why Search Engines loves blogs! And so should you.

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Get Your New Blog Noticed (Part 2)

In my previous posts, I have covered Why Search Engines Love Blogs! And So Should You, and highlighted that search engines do love blogs and bloggers.

Also for those who need a little inspiration on starting your first blog, do read about My Love and Hate Relationship with Blogging which also explores the synergy between blogs, search engines, rankings and keywords.

This article is for those few brave souls, who have just initiated their journey into blogging, and need that amazing high one gets when your blog is finally getting read by a substantial number of readers, please read Get your New Blog Noticed (Part 1) of this article first.

As promised, and a seo expert always keeps his promise, here are some of the strategies that have worked for me:

Deep-Linking

As a SEO expert in Mumbai, I often advise new clients to start a corporate blog for their employees, customer, vendors, associates and investors. The benefits of doing so are many, as seen in the trend where many corporate blogs are doing very well in building brand loyalty, customer loyalty and driving business through existing customers.

I also advise my clients to start a topic specific blog of their expertise. To give you an example of this, my corporate website is www.seo-optimization-experts.com, so I started a blog Zen of SEO, which tells the truth about SEO based on actual experiences and mistakes I made during my journey. My SEO blog attracts marketing professionals, seo students, Internet marketing professionals, readers and businessman like you.

Now comes the easy part; Create relevant deep links between your corporate website pages, corporate blog posts and topic blog posts. Your website, corporate blog and topic blog are treated as separate sites as far as search engines go, so don’t hesitate to use you’re your content for link building purposes.

Each blog post is a potential to build another link to your corporate website. But don’t overdo it. I don’t think the search engines would penalize a site for too many links (unless the site is just a whole bunch of links for the pure purposes of link farming, and trying to trick the search engines to give irrelevant results), but it could a big turn off for your readers who just want to enjoy the story and don’t care much about your hair brained strategies to dominate the internet.

Cross-Linking

It’s easy to create links when you are the master of your website and blogs, but how do we get other websites/ blogs to give the same quality links back to your blog.

As in the real world if you have to build a new contact, you would approach that person, introduce yourself, inform that person of the value you offer, and maintain a good relation with that person.

In the blog world building links is no different.

1. Approach websites that has content/target audience similar to your blogs and offer some additional value to their readers, or even better write a good intelligent review about some service/products that website is offering. Send a nice email highlighting the same with a link back to your blog post. Online marketers like collecting testimonials so there is great probability that they will link back to your blog.

2. Approach other bloggers who command high loyalty. Most of the time if you have a professional approach, a good pitch and a value proposition, most bloggers will not mind writing a small review and linking to your blog. After all the bloggers need to create content daily, so offer then a helping hand. Many bloggers advocate semi-advertising in their posts, and bloggers define their tastes, preferences, likes and dislikes about brands all the time. So why not get onto the bandwagon.

Another way is to leave intelligent comment on the bloggers post with something nice to say about the blogger, and then give a small link to your blog to explain in detail. Most times the blogger will leave a good comment and not delete it. I don’t personally use this method, but as they say, in this matter, flattery may get you what you want.

3. Some SEO experts and bloggers have good relations with other fellow bloggers. A good seo expert should be able to get some of these bloggers to write a good review and link to your blog/ website. It will drive traffic to your website and add to your link building campaign.

Create a RSS Feed

Most blog software’s like Blogger allow users to create an automatic RSS feed Eg. http://www.seo-optimization-experts.com/atom.xml is the feed for my blog. If you notice it’s a very simple page, no major formatting, no pictures and videos.

RSS also knows as “Real Simple Syndication” is a mechanism used to distribute content without depending on the browser or email client. Users subscribe to RSS feeds to get latest updates (headlines with a small brief) about their favorite websites/ blogs across the internet in one place.

In your case, your blog posts form part of content that can be syndicated across news/content feeds. Once your RSS feed is published, you can submit the feed to many of the feed aggregators and have your content/ blog post distributed across their network of users. You can start by using this link http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm to submit your blog to many feeds.

Submit to Article Sites

I have covered article writing in my previous posts, SEO Guide to Article Writing, where I have explained in detail on why to submit to article sites. Article sites are a great way for distributing your content to many sites without the fear of landing into soup for duplicate content. In addition you are building credibility as an expert in your domain, quality links, and driving traffic to your blog.

By submitting your blog posts to article submission sites having high page rank, you are basically syndicating the same content across various channels, getting links, and traffic. Now that’s a good deal!

A note of warning, don’t just submit your article to 1000 sites, rather be wise and work with a few key article sites. In this way it’s easy to build a good relationship with those sites and their audiences, as they feel that you have not plastered your article across every living website in the world.

Also its easy to keep the momentum up, otherwise submitting each blog post to 1000 sites would be rather time consuming I would say.

Go Social with your Blog

Social bookmarking is the next wave to hit the new media landscape. Millions of users surfing the internet now have a voice and can rate/bookmark and suggest websites, blogs and share their likes and dislikes with the billions of surfers.

Wikipedia describes social bookmarking as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Register your blog with services like digg, reddit, del.icio.us and stumbleupon. Give your readers an opportunity to suggest/ bookmark/tag your blog post across the social media landscape and watch the traffic come in.

If you like this blog post, please suggest this post to the social bookmarking sites listed below the post. It will be highly appreciated.

Make a Noise

Hey you have worked hard to get your blog started. Now is the time to announce it to the world, atleast the online world. Submit your blog to blogger search engines like Technorati, and other blogging directories on the net. As you submit your blog to the various directories out there, your blog is reaching out to newer audiences.

You can also submit your blog to PR sites which allow companies to submit press releases and announcements. It may not do much for your rankings, but many journalists are known to scan press release sites for a good story. Could it be you?

You can also announce your blog by putting it on your visiting card, in your email footer, on your corporate website, Facebook (profile, posts on wall, comments etc), Youtube profile, Linkedin profile, and finally the good ol’ word of mouth.

These should keep you busy for the next few months, and by then you will be raring to get into more advanced techniques of marketing and promoting your Blog.

But that my friend’s is another time, another story!

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Get Your New Blog Noticed (Part 1)

In my previous posts, I have covered Why Search Engines Love Blogs! And So Should You, and highlighted that search engines do love blogs and bloggers.

Also for those who need a little inspiration on starting your first blog, do read about My Love and Hate Relationship with Blogging which also explores the synergy between blogs, search engines, rankings and keywords.

This article is for those few brave souls, who have just initiated their journey into blogging, and need that amazing high one gets when your blog is finally getting read by a substantial number of readers.

Please track your blog readers using services like Google Analytics, it just takes 10minutes, and it will provide you with a vault of valuable information on your reader’s preferences, where your readers come from, and how they interact with your blog.

For those of you thinking about right now “Hey, I like writing for the love of it, and I don’t need any readers for approval”, I would like to say kudos to you, and do continue the good work.

But if you are serious about sharing your hard work (its blood sweat and tears when you have to do it 5 times a week) with the millions of users searching blogs daily, then let’s continue our journey down the rabbit hole.

A quick recap on the statistics on Blogging - comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
• Total internet audience 188.9 million
• Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US alone
• Facebook: 41.0 million
• MySpace 75.1 million

Well that the good news!

But the bad news is that with the thousands of new blogs churning out each day, what hope is there for a reader interested in your topic to reach you. You many have written brilliant masterpieces, but how do you let others know that (remember most poets and artists die poor and unrecognized because they don’t reach out to share themselves with others.

In this post, I will not get into details about the quality of your content, and I am assuming you have written good clean copy. Good copy being informative, entertaining and engaging (Don’t forget to get your keywords in the body content as well the labels/tags).

There are various ways to promote your blog and reach out to the millions out there. The strategies below will not only assist you in getting more traffic to your blog, but also get you higher rankings for your blog, as well as corporate site (if you have one).

I have personally applied all the strategies listed below, and learnt the hard way by the many mistakes one makes when trying something new. This is months of hard work on a platter for you! Enjoy.

Since this blog post is going to become too long, I am going to break it up into 2 parts. I will be putting up the blog promotion strategies that have worked for me in the next blog post Get your New Blog Noticed (Part 2).

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