How To Successfully Comment On Forums, News And Article Based Sites
So today I want to share some insights about commenting I gained over the years
. Search Engine Optimization will only get you so far; it is the systematic build-up of strong high PR (Page Rank) links that will increase traffic to your site. To put it in another way, website SEO is your key to big traffic, while backlinks are the driving force behind your sites traffic.So commenting. Among the readers there will be some who already heard the basic guidelines about commenting but Im going to give you something extra so stay focused and read carefully.
The basic idea behind comments
If you think about where comments are generally found, then you already have a sense of where your work will principally take place. Forums, news sites, blogs, basically everywhere where a community can be found. The majority of websites nowadays from small to big cannot leave out the comment section from their pages. Why? Because community is what really makes high traffic and a strong community will more likely return, comment, read and generally stay on the site more etc. (which is the driving force behind ads and therefore money). These sites probably already have way bigger website traffic to their pages than you ever will, but whats important is that you make a presence (in the form of comments) and drive targeted traffic from their pages to yours.
How NOT to do it
If youve been surfing the Internet then it will come as no surprise that the amount of spam messages are crazy. Forums are especially watchful in letting new users post advertisements in their comments and believe me: they will ban you the moment (!) you say/link/mention a website that even has the slightest look of an affiliate site or something that generally does not belong there. Now, if you ever read the forum rules of sites then youll see that some allow signatures (text under your comment that is always visible) while others dont but more importantly none tolerate ads posted. I often see new users with just a couple posts behind them posting ads in their comments, and what do you know both the posts and the users disappear overnight. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that new users (looking for quick and easy traffic) get banned and quickly give up hope.
Register
So how do you plant your sites URL on these sites without getting banned? Well, through a number of stages.
First, you register to all the places you want to comment on. These should be of course high PR websites with lots of daily traffic. There will be a post on how to find these. So you register, but with what name? It all depends on your niche (the segment you are targeting with your website). So if your site is selling a product that gives precious information on workout techniques then you want to use a masculine name, because youll be trying to convince guys (mainly) that you are a tough kid and an expert in your area. Here I googled it for you: http://www.top-100-baby-names-search.com/tough-boy-names.html (Knox or anything). If you want a feminine name for a diet or weight loss product go with something exotic and so on Besides the name, the second most important stuff to look out for is your profile picture and your avatar (which everyone will see when you post). So you guessed it. With a tough name selling a muscle product, comes a tough picture. For example: http://tinyurl.com/6pafbap. Now you want to choose something that does NOT resemble a celebrity, and is NOT shot like celebrities are. So look for something that people would upload to Facebook as their profile picture. But (!) you want a picture where the person (in this case the tough guy) does not look in the camera. Why? Because it feels more natural if the photo were taken while the person was not watching (remember: you want originality). Now the trick here is to find the balance between the two. You do want people to think you are that actual person, but at the same time you dont want to look like an average Joe.
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Some forums do not allow the usage of celebrity photos as avatars but I tried it out and they had no problems with it. So you search Google pictures and first look for a specific face that you yourself like. For example: http://tinyurl.com/72t65j2. UFC fighter, not too professional but might just stand out. The more time you put into searching the photo the more chances you have for successfully making people click on your profile and see your link on your profile page (which will be the goal).
Where to comment
You are registered, got the picture and the name that are specific to your niche and have a decent profile page. By this I mean fill out the profile page with random data that your niche profile would support (in this case, you have been working out since 14; you are an expert on muscles and so on). You are now ready to comment. Do NOT fill out the signature yet. You will instantly get banned no matter how hard you try covering up the fact that you are an affiliate (especially since you joined a couple of days ago, you are under close surveillance).
So about posting: you check out the Forum and see thousands of threads opened where people talk about various stuff. There may be even several topics to choose from. You obviously choose the one that has the most views (if it is indexed) or the most topics. For example: http://tinyurl.com/cddls2d . Here you have Introductions and Weight loss Talk both at around 2688 topics, but the latter has double the posts: 25 000 is not pretty good. Do you see even more popular topics? Personal Progress with 33 000 (as of May 05, 2012). So you get the idea. You need to post your thoughts into topics/discussions where there are actually people reading/viewing it.
If you go inside Personal Progress (same website) youll see thousands of topics. Here what really matters is the views replies ratio. Ideally youd have only a couple of replies and hundreds of views. For example I see one right now, 2 replies with 300 views. This means that the first 2 comments (and your third if youre quick enough) will get seen by 300 viewers and more in the following days. Oh and obviously, try to join conversations that are fresh and new, like the above-mentioned.
You now know exactly where to put your comment, with what picture and what name.
Lure visitors
The whole idea of this forum posting comes from the fact that people will click on your picture if it is cool enough or you arouse their curiosity by either posting a witty comment or by having a photo that simply makes people curious. That is why it is so important to choose these carefully. Now the best sites are obviously the ones allowing signature and a big picture because later when you get to around a 100 post (on each forum you registered) you switch on your signature line and pray to God that moderators will not label you a spammer. In the meantime the maximum effort you can do is to put your sites address into your profile page (filling out maybe the occupation or job space), saying that managing your blog or something is your occupation, and then you include the link preferably in full (http://) so people will only have to click on it and not be forced to copy and paste.
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Up till now Ive been talking about forums. But blogs and any other site that has a comment section is no different. Firstly, there are very few places where you can instantly post a comment (well talk about these later). You need to register, search a name and a picture, and only then comment. The difference here lies in the ability of these sites to make you wait until your comment appears, basically killing every effort to quickly post a scam and then disappear. So what you want to do is simply search for fresh news and blog posts and post into the comment section. Ideally, the newest posts are shown. If so, then post in the afternoon, because that is when people get tired at work and start browsing or they get home and switch on the computer.
How often should Ipost?
Well, on forums it is unlimited basically. As long as you tell something related to the discussion its usually okay to post up to 10-15 comments. But do NOT post anything of the below:
Good discussion!
wow, thanks.
this is useful
etc.
You get the idea. These will not probe viewers to click on your profile, and you may even get banned for using them too much (it happens believe me). You want to say something that is related to the current discussion. You dont actually need to read the whole debate, you can just skim read a reply and paraphrase it. The point is that it will be your multiple paragraphed, intelligent comments your cool sounding, unique name and your alluring, cool picture that will make users click on your profile. What they will see there is preferably a fully filled out profile page with hobbies, Bio etc. But most importantly, they should readily see your link (in blue ideally): my blog: http://myblog.com.
According to my experiences, the percentage of people actually visiting your website based on seeing your profile page in Forums will not be above 50%. Meaning that from 100 viewers of a specific profile page, never expect more than 50 curious visitors to your site. And dont forget that its not the number of visitors to your site that matters but the quality and inclination of these visitors to buy. But you dont need 100% conversion anyway. Posting to topics that get around 1000 views in a day, and being the second one answering something will result in pretty good numbers.
Posting a healthy 3 comments/day is enough in my opinion (especially to forums). For blogs or news and article sites, you should first approach it with a daily 1, then speed up after one or two weeks to 2/day and you might as well stop there. As soon as you flood the comment section with your comments moderators might say its enough and ban you with your existing comments (so you did more harm than good).
If you think about it rationally, both you and site admins are trying to make some money. If the comment section is always full of your comments then its no good for them. A couple ones throughout the whole site is not doing any harm so both of you can be happy.
The Terrible Truth
You might observe that your comments will gradually get to the lowest positions or even get deleted. That is why I advise you to keep a log (a Word document or anything) where you always put the URL of sites commented on. You then check these every other day of a posting campaign and see which links are live and which are dead. You cant do much with sites that delete your comments, except try nonetheless and write even more text around your link and post it like that. If it still does not get past moderators then you need to rule that site out and move on. You dont need all the high-raking websites of your niche to send traffic to your site. A couple ones is the maximum you can hope for.
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What you actually need to write
I forgot to talk about these posts/comments you need to write in order to sell your link and make people click on it. You often find that a site allows the usage of one short sentence and a link combo. Use this if no registration needed (you can login with Facebook, more on this later) so you cant get banned, but keep it 2 posts per day still. Otherwise a text of a couple sentences needs to be produced and at the bottom your URL linked:
If I need assistance/help with losing weight/getting ripped/whatever I usually go to this site: http://yoursite.com. It offers this and this, the guy/girl writes pretty witty/helpful posts etc.
There you go a sample of some sort. Be creative and write a couple lines, then include your URL. If your comment is deleted, there is one more thing you can do. Delete the beginning of your URL which will this way get past the automatic spam filters that look for www or http://. So what you use is this:
myblog.com
Instead of the usual URL:
http://myblog.com
You wont be able to track visitors from these links because they have to be put into the URL directly, but its more than nothing. One last thing you can do is to use If anyone interested + link. This implies that you dont really want to push the ad down on peoples throat, just trying to spread the word.
If anyone interested
yoursitesellingsomething.com
Now you know what name and picture you should register with, how to comment and also the little tricks that separate successful links, driving traffic to your pages, from the ones that arent noticeable to anyone.
Just to show you that commenting works:
This is one of my smaller sites analytics. It is 52 visitors by the end of around 25 days with a note that I stopped commenting after 10 days (not in full time of course). I could have pushed on and searched for more sites, in which case Id have way more traffic but I stopped for personal reasons. The point is that I posted around 40-50+ comments throughout my targeted websites and visitors clicked or copied my link and arrived at my site.
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If you have any experiences in commenting, do share, if youre a beginner and need some help ask in the Comment section and Ill try and reply as soon as I can.
Greetings,
Archie
by: Archie