Commenting For Links
I have a friend from college who has taught me just about everything I know about being an affiliate and making money off the internet. It always seemed to me that he was on the leading edge of every wave. He bought up some hot poker domain names when internet gambling was young, and sold them for a nice profit when it became hot. He started blogging when it was first become popular and over the years has become an expert at SEO.
I recently asked him how he found all the time to work on his websites, get backlinks, and socialize with other bloggers. I said that I generally only have time to work on one thing in any given day. I told him that I generally broke down each day by whether I was going to be blogging, working on getting backlinks, or reading other blogs and trying to get ideas.
He replied to me that I was looking at everything the wrong way. One of my problems, he said, was that I was thinking of each of those activities as separate. He saved time by combining all the three things together, so that when he was working on one of them, he was working on all of them.
How did he do this? Well the first thing is that whenever he read blogs he always saved half of them or so that he could link to later in his posts. He taught me that having lots of outgoing links was one of the cheapest and most effective ways to advertise your blog. After all he asked, how often do you check your stats, and see where your traffic is coming from. I was forced to reply “Just about every day.”
“Well Don’t you think the other bloggers do the same thing”
“Yeah, the probably do”
“So if they are getting traffic from your site, isn’t it likely that they will check your site out, and probably send you traffic back?”
The other important thing that he taught me was to never read a blog without commenting on it. Assuming that comments are enabled, always comment on what you read. After all, he said, you just spent 5-10 minutes to read to blog and think about the article. Why not take another minute to right some something genuinely interesting in the comments section, and get a link and hopefully some traffic out of it.
I believe what he told me was very important, and am starting to do so myself. I never read blogs any more without commenting on them, and it has started to drive traffic to me. Linking out to other blogs is harder, as I always forget to bookmark the interesting pages and have to search for them. However it is still good advice. After all, outbound links are free.
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