In my last post I explained the value of blog comment marketing. This one will give you details on how to find appropriate posts to comment on.
First, the dead-obvious suggestion: start with the blogs you’re already reading. Hopefully you’ve selected some high quality blogs that are written for people who are a lot like your ideal reader.
As you’re reading through posts, stay alert for points that catch your attention, give you an idea, remind you of something else, or even irritate you a little. Those things are excellent comment-fodder and, if you can communicate a response with clarity and intelligence, you’ll probably get the attention of the blogger and the readers.
Once you’ve visited all your “usual suspects,” though, where should you turn next?
Technorati
There are lots of options, but one of the best discovery tools is Technorati. Technorati’s claim to fame is their huge directory of blogs—over 110 million as of this writing. They also keep tabs on new posts, so they’re a great resource when you’re looking for fresh blog content on a specific topic.
The easiest way to find the most relevant posts is to use the search feature. Because of the absolutely massive amount of posts, you’ll want to be pretty specific with your search. Play around with it until you’re getting 3-10 relevant posts over the last couple of days. Then just read each of those posts and leave a thoughtful comment, and you’re done. (Well, almost. I like to track all of my comments with Commentful, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.)
Google BlogSearch
For our purposes, Google BlogSearch is a lot like Technorati. Often you’ll see the same posts in both places, so try them both for a few days and see which one you prefer; then just use the other briefly to pick up any that your primary method missed. Be sure to brush up on your search syntax to get the most out of Google.
CommentKahuna
I’m also growing to love a free little program called CommentKahuna (sorry, Mac folks, it’s Windows only). As far as I can tell, it’s being given away free to get people on a mailing list, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s a still a great deal for me.
So what does CommentKahuna do? It finds blogs and blog posts that match your search terms. Exactly what you need, right? And it has a couple of other features that make it even better.
One is that it can be set (under “Options”) to mark blogs that will link directly to you, without using the “nofollow” attribute. This matters because you’ll get more benefit from Google by commenting on these blogs. Similarly, you can view the resulting blogs ranked by Google Pagerank and focus your efforts on the blogs that are already Google’s favorites.
The process of commenting with CommentKahuna is very simple. First, you create a “Profile”; this is your personal information that you normally fill in along with your comment. CommentKahuna keeps track of this info and fills it in for you, which saves a step.
The program also lets you visit the blogs right through its interface, one right after another. This saves time, but more importantly for me, means I’m less likely to get distracted (my biggest time-waster of all!).
In many cases, the link that CommentKahuna gives you goes to a blog’s homepage. In this case, just take a quick browse through to see if any of the posts catch your eye. If not, move on.
I find it’s most effective for me to search for keywords that are related to my most recent post. My reasoning is twofold. First, this keeps the me from constantly getting the same suggested blogs. Second, this makes it more likely that a visitor following my link will be interested in my blog.
You’ll probably have to tweak CommentKahuna somewhat to get it “just right.” I’ve had better results limiting the search to WordPress blogs; otherwise I was getting a lot of quasi-blogs that didn’t have traditional comments. I’ve also found it important to quickly note the dates on posts; adding a comment a year after the fact doesn’t really promote the relationship unless the comment is extremely relevant.
I agree that that commenting is a great way for exposure. I have formed relationships in a very short time due to commenting alone. I don’t find it as hard to become friends with “blog stars.” When posting comments you make a couple good points and contact them if you don’t hear from them. Most bloggers are trying to network the same as you and I have found they will reach out before you do.
Couple of points:
Blogsearch is terrible. Full of autogenerated spam. Better to just use regular google search with ‘blog’ appended as a modiifer.
Thanks for sharing Comment Kahuna. Looks like a useful resource and I’ll have to look. That said, I have a list of Dofollow blogs that I’m finding has very outdated info. Many of the blogs have reverted to nofollow. So depending on where that plugin gets its data and whether it continues to do regular checks, then you might get varying results.
Something to help you find Google blogsearch was written by my friend Slightly Shady SEO: http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/?p=136
BTW, thanks for the comment on my SEOmoz/youmoz post. Always appreciated
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Cheers
Gab
If a person makes a post on a blog, it really needs to be relevant, or else it’s just wasted space.
wow! I happen to use Comment Kahuna now in blog commenting. I like this software because it is user friendly and saves a lot of time.
I agree with @Infected By Bugs about relevance -although I’m sure you knew that.
While blogging in Blogger, I’ve found a way to thank the person for joining the convo and to keep it relevant within the pop text box. However, I couldn’t design a savvy solution for the person to write to me (aside from the textimage.gif in the nav bar).
Having recently migrated to Wordpress and using the tabs create ‘An About Me’ page allows visitors to make general comments at their leisure.
Blogging has come to the point where my mother actually heard of it. That means that it is not only popular but becoming somewhat mainstream. As a result, people are really starting to voice their opinions by blogging and commenting on blogs. Voicing opinion is one thing, but when it comes to commenting there is a very useful side effect. Commenting can help increase your website’s rankings on certain search engines.