Blog Commenting

If you are familiar with the general layout of a blog, chances are pretty good you’ve seen a place where you can actively participate and share your comments on the topic being discussed.  Each individual blog has it’s own style of displaying comments, but the whole idea is pretty much the same.  It is most common to see a link at the end of each blog post, giving you the opportunity to leave your opinion.  There are some who just enjoy participating in the discussion, but the main reason people participate is to leave a link to their own website with hopes of getting some traffic.

Now before going you go wild and start leaving comments on a bunch of blogs, you should learn the right way to do it.  I can’t tell you how many times I see people go about this all wrong.  Commenting the wrong way will just be a waste of your time and energy.  Remember, you are trying to build traffic and make some money during the whole process.

Begin the process by doing a little research.  Search for active, current, and popular blog posts that are related to your own niche.  You want to find posts where you can provide at least some intelligent feedback.  One line comments that aren’t very informative will simply be overlooked.  Comments such as “nice post” or “thanks for sharing” really don’t add much to your credibility.  You don’t have to write an essay either.  A brief informative comment on a relevant topic can drive significant traffic to your website.  The blog post you are commenting on should be on a high traffic website.  Leaving a comment on a website with little to no traffic won’t produce results.

Engaging in the conversation with a helpful comment will spark interest in who you are and what you have to say.  It even works great if you sometimes question the original authors perspective on the topic.  Adding a little fuel to the fire and starting a little debate can also put you in the spotlight.  Just always remember to be professional, polite, and informative.  This will help you come across as someone who has a good degree of knowledge on the topic being discussed.

It is important to stay on topic and follow through with this process.  This method of driving traffic has proven to be highly effective, over and over again.  It is very simple to do, takes very little time, and once again…it’s free!

Some of these methods may seem repetitive, but they work! If you are already implementing them, GREAT! If you haven’t used these methods and techniques yet, now is the time to learn how and why you should be using them.

Blog All About It…

Blog it! It’s as simple as that. Take a few moments to create a free blog on either Wordpress or Blogger. Once you have your free blog set up, link back to your product site. You’ll be amazed how much free laser targeted traffic you can obtain through free blogs. Just be sure that your blog is relevant to your product site. Splash your blog with some high quality content such as articles, related industry news, etc. Remember that you want to be using certain keywords and keyword phrases while creating this content.

Participate in Related Communities, Forums, Groups, and Message Boards…

There’s nothing like becoming part of groups and forums that bring people together interested in the same topics as yourself. Just remember not to spam these sites with your business information. If you interact with others in communities, provide useful information and build a bit of reputation for you and your business. You just may be surprised at how much good and quality traffic you can obtain.

Write Articles…

I’ve mentioned this a billion times before. Writing articles can drive massive amounts of laser targeted traffic to your web sites. Check out ways you can outsource article writing if you are not interested in writing articles yourself.

Don’t Forget The Basics…

Forgetting the basic ways to drive traffic to your site is easy to do. I shared some traffic increasing tips a little while back, so feel free to review some of the basic effective methods.

Pay Per Click Advertising…

If you have a little money you can spend on advertising, PPC advertising through Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing can bring a significant of laser targeted traffic to your site. Just be cautious so you don’t go broke in the process. PPC is awesome when it works, but if you’re not careful you can go through a lot of money with little results. Take the time to research specific keywords and phrases, and learn a little bit about your competition.

Did you know that simple images on your site can drive traffic to your website for free? Best yet, if used correctly, the traffic that comes to your site will be targeted traffic, the best traffic you can receive. I’ll quickly share a few tips on how to experience an increase in traffic. These are all extremely quick and easy to do, and best of all it doesn’t cost you a single penny.

Naming Your Images

Focus on the titles that you assign to each image throughout all of the content on your website. Naming your images so that they are SEO friendly is an important step during this whole process. Let’s say you have a website that’s focused on recipes, better yet, leftover turkey recipes. When listing your recipes, you may choose to display a photograph of the finished recipe, such as a photo of a turkey pot pie. Instead of displaying your image with an obscure title such as “tpp01.jpg”, name your image “turkey-pot-pie-recipe.jpg”. Using hyphens to separate each word in the title of your image is a better option than an underscore.

Use Alt Tags

Always remember to add alt tags to your images when you are including them on your website. Your alt tags should be relevant to the image that you are posting. So let’s go back to the turkey pot pie example. If you wish to display an image of a turkey pot pie created from a recipe, label your image with an alt tag such as “Turkey Pot Pie Recipe”. The alt tags show up on search engine result pages rather than the titles of the image.

Choose Your Images Wisely

If you haven’t experimented around with image searches such as Google Image Search, now is the time to do so. Spend some time searching through the site before adding a specific image. I’m going to dive back into the whole turkey pot pie example once again. Let’s say you use Google Image Search to search using the phrase turkey pot pie. Click on the image beneath to get a better look at what’s being shown. You’ll see that searching for this phrase will return 808,000 results.

Now let’s try something a little bit more specific. Try a Google Image Search using the phrase double crusted turkey pot pie. Click on the image below to see that this search will return 85,100 results. This opens up a window of opportunity for you. If you choose to be a bit more specific and include an image on your site of a double crusted turkey pot pie rather than just a turkey pot pie, you’ll have less competition when it comes to having your images indexed and displayed on Google.

Relevant Text With Images

Remember to include relevant text and keywords near the images you are posting. This can help the search engines index your site and rank your images. There are all sorts of ways you can include images within the content of your website, however you’ll have to experiment with what works best so that you can achieve the best results.

Making Your Images Unique

Nothing is better than including your own unique images within the content of your website. But of course there are times when you’ll include some images or photos that are available for free across the internet. When you use free images, be sure and resize them and make them unique to your content. Having a new and fresh resized version of the image can help separate the image from all the rest across the web.

I’m certain that if you implement these tips that you’ll find an increase of traffic to your site. Always remember to monitor your site’s stats to see what is being found and what isn’t. This will give you the ability to make necessary changes when it comes time.