If You Do Not Comment On This Post You Fail At Life

Blogs tend to have a lot of people that read them… on average, I hit at least 500 uniques a day usually with more than 1,000 coming in on the good days. The thing is, and this is the case with most blogs – the visitor to comment ratio just doesn’t do very well. With my posts tending to get around 15 comments each time (it’s actually around 16-18, but to make this easier let’s go with a rounded number  ) the conversion ratio is 0.03 or just 3% (estimating 500 views a day). Whereas that number would be fairly decent if you were talking about sales made, this is just comments – something that takes all of thirty seconds to do and more important is free to all those that view the blog, and they don’t even require so much work to leave… so why don’t more people comment on your posts?

I will tell you one thing right now – if you read posts and don’t comment, you are wasting your time. I used to be like that too – I used to bounce from post to post in the blogosphere, just skimming, rarely commenting… before realising that ultimately, I wasn’t doing anything of use to improve my own blog. By commenting, you are. 😀

The next time you aimlessly wander for hours through your favourite list of blogs, leave interesting, insightful comments on each of them, and bam – rather than wasting half a day doing jack all, you’re building links and traffic. By leaving links on blogs with dofollow, you are building PRed links back to your own website – they help, in the long run as you’ll gain higher Pagerank and then be able to use that to increase your bank balance (*cough*sknil lles*cough*)  . 🙂

Seriously… you’ve taken the time to read the post, right till the bottom… why not comment? By commenting, you’re not only helping yourself (see the high PR links above, and you will also have some clicks sent your way if your comments are interesting/controversial) but also contributing to the blogger by helping him build discussion – s/he sees you comment enough, I guarantee you that they’ll take a look at your website (I visit the websites of all those that comment on TUK, even if they are irrelevant/unrelated… I’ve found some very interesting setups  ), and maybe even become regular visitors/commenters – I cannot count how many people that have visited TUK, told me that they were pleasantly surprised by what they saw and that they had subscribed to the RSS feed – all in exchange for a couple of lines I left on their blogs.

Do I comment on every post I read?

No, of course not. Although I don’t spend my day reading blogs anymore, I do check a few (hundred) of the blogs I like – quite a few of them when I’m just relaxing and don’t have the energy to think of something intelligent (my view is that if you cannot leave something intelligent, do not leave something at all, unless you’re joking around of course)… I also re-visit quite a few blogs not to check up on their new posts, but on their old ones that I found interesting – just to check for updates. I have however left a few comments during the past week, some of which that were left on blogs that I’d never seen before… and the stats definitely have increased (not just unique visitors, but time spent on websites).

Do you want to know the key to commenting?

Don’t hit the A-Lister blogs. The problem is, there are thousands of people looking to spam the A-Lister blogs just for backlinks, so your posts will go unnoticed – sometimes even by the person that runs the blog themselves.

Hit bloggers that are similarly established, or slightly worse/better off – it is they that you can best network with.I will give you a real-life example – Christine Senter. A couple of weeks ago, I had no idea who she was, and I’m pretty sure she knew jack all about TUK – a few comment exchanges later, and I’ve added her to my list of blogs to check up every so often and I’d hope she’s done the same. Another example – Blogger Noob. Actually, I’d known about his blog a long time ago, but never really taken an active interest in it – these days, I comment on a few of his posts when I have time and he reciprocates in kind. 🙂

The future of blogging are the little guys. Not the A-listers. It is the people that are plugging away today, not with the thousands of readers – they are the ones that will be big in a few months, a year even… and if you get in early, you can make sure you make the best out of your relationship with them before it is too late. 😀

By the way, TUK uses dofollow, and you’ll gain nice PR3 backlinks by commenting. Also, with the title of the blog post, how can you not comment?