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The other day I was reading John Wesley’s “Pick The Brain” blog post on 27 Lessons Learned on the Way to 3000 Visits a Day and 2200 RSS Subscribers. #20 took me by surprise. So much so that I’ve been thinking about it and doing my own research. And I’ve came to the conclusion he may be right.
#20 on this list is “Posting comments on other blogs is overrated“. We’ve always been led to believe that commenting on other blogs will bring us lots of traffic, make us cool and good looking all in one.
After reading John’s post, I started looking through my blog’s stats, courtesy of Google Analytics, to see just how much traffic I get from comments on other blogs.
My findings were somewhat surprising.
I comment quite often on some rather large blogs such as JohnChow.com and Shoemoney, as well as a host of smaller sites. I’m not sure how much traffic these two get in a course of a month, but I’d say it’s in the thousands per day.
In one months time, I’d received less than 30 visits from these two sites combined! Many of the other blogs accounted for a few visitors each. Total for the month from all blog comments, less than 50 visitors.
Wow, I think John is on to something!
The Real Value of Commenting On Other Blogs
Comments on blogs were never meant to be used to share PR link love or drive hordes of traffic to your site. However many “guru’s” will tell you that you must do this in order to build traffic.
The real value in commenting on other blogs is that you’re building a relationship not only with the blog owner, but with the readers of that blog as well. Whether or not they visit your site is not as important as them getting to know you.
I enjoy commenting on other peeps blogs. I enjoy the different views many other bloggers have and it’s interesting to see the response some bloggers get to their latest post.
So if you’re only commenting on other blogs in hopes that massive traffic is coming your way, you may be in for a let down. Post comments if you have something to add to the discussion, otherwise your time driving traffic to your site can be better spent elsewhere.
3 responses so far ↓
1 John Wesley // May 26, 2007 at 10:00 am
Very good analysis. You make a good point, comments help to get your name out there which is important in the beginning. Unfortunately, they don’t do much to get links or traffic, especially on larger blogs.
2 Donovan // May 31, 2007 at 6:37 am
Your point is very well taken. I just recently came to these same conclusions myself after realizing most of the “guru” sites use ‘no follow’.
I like to comment on other blogs to get myself involved in the community, but I only do so if I feel I can add value to the post. Although, it doesn’t hurt if the blog belongs to the ‘I Follow’ movement.
3 El Yanqui // Jun 10, 2007 at 7:22 am
Perhaps commenting on blogs isn’t the most effective way to generate traffic, but that’s not really why I comment. I love having people comment on my site. I use dofollow and let other people create links to their sites through it, although the traffic boost might be negligible.
I like posts on my blog and posting on other blogs because it makes it more of a community activity. That’s the aspect of blogging that I really enjoy and that’s the real value of commenting.
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