How to write great comments

Writing comments on other blogs is an age-old technique to increase your blog traffic. Everyone knows it - right? You knew it.

Let’s have a deeper look at this phenomena. Firstly, is it just a “technique”? Well, i think otherwise.

I think it’s a cool and natural way to express your love and admiration to other blogs - and of course, contribute to the thinking process.

But unfortunately, many a times people see it as a technique - i must admit during my initial blogging days, i thought it’s a technique. And i used it where ever possible, but i was always worried about the ROI. I write 10 comments a day and i wait for my traffic. And you would’ve already guessed what happened. - Nothing much!

So i quit commenting. But later one day i found some cool “commentators” like Ashish Mohta - who is a ferocious “commentator” and comments on many popular and unpopular blogs. I see him on the top commentators list on many blogs. And i thought I’m missing something and went back to commenting - but this time with a difference.

I didn’t see it as a technique - but a way to express my love and appreciation to fellow bloggers. This helped me in four ways.

• I didn’t get tired commenting.
• I started to read more blogs.
• I got noticed in the blogsphere by fellow bloggers.
• And finally, some traffic too.

I wouldn’t actually recommend commenting as a technique to increase your traffic, and don’t be tempted seeing my fourth point. It’s only a negligible amount of traffic I received. But, I’m glad that these are loyal or like-minded visitors - these negligible amount of traffic sure is different from the rest of massive organic traffic i receive. And there are great sites like Kevin’s Bloggingtips.com which does not have the “nofollow” tag attached to the links in the comments - which is a novel way to go about encouraging commenting. (I’m sure Kevin will spent a good amount of time deleting spam from his comments.)

• Traffic from comments will bring you loyal visitors who tend to develop a liking with you. So though negligible, they are precious.
• Choose the sites that you comment carefully. You don’t want to use a “big-shot” bloggers blog, who wouldn’t even bother to reply or read your comment. But choose bloggers who have a similar mindset as your’s - they’ll make good friends.
• Don’t annoy people with your comments. You may be tempted to disagree with an article in an A-List blogger’s blog. But disagree in style - so that, even if you don’t get the writer’s attention, you may lure the other commenters to visit your site.

Bottom line - enjoy commenting, love it, taste it and chew it down - comment to your friends, join the thought process, disagree in style - and you’ll be in the loop.

I’ve done it - succeeded(No I’m not a super-star but in my own ways), believe me.