People I work with understand the importance of interacting with other blogs in and around their market niche.
They understand the concept. But they are largely terrible at doing it effectively and regularly.
What would be the result of taking 30-60 minutes per day commenting on the blogs you follow, from the A-Listers to up-and-coming blogs?
Well, see for yourself!
How to do a comment blitz everyday in the shortest time possible:
- Get on Google Reader if you don’t have it fired up yet.
- Find and subscribe to every blog in your market that is important enough. (This won’t take very long since there aren’t that many blogs with enough traffic and following to bother with in most markets.)
- Fire up Google Reader once you have a decent list of blogs in it, and just start clicking.
- Take the latest post that comes up on each blog you pull up, read the post or skim enough to get the gist of it, and make an intelligent comment.
- Link back to different pages of your site with each comment, or link sometimes to your Facebook fan page, or twitter, or, you get the idea!
- Do this without having anything else going on to distract you and get through all the blogs you can in the time you allot yourself. In one hour you can do a lot of quality commenting! 30 minutes would even be a great amount of benefit to your blog in terms of links and direct traffic.
- Take a week to do this every day and watch your stats.
- Watch how direct traffic comes from some sites more than others and adjust your list of blogs you comment on regularly to prioritize the ones that send the most direct traffic.
Having a system for your daily marketing plan is crucial. It needs to be something you schedule and is easy to accomplish as long as you aren’t multi-tasking.
It keeps you focused on the task at hand and gets you through some of the things that are boring to do, but that have a high return.
I suggest, if you find this exercise boring, that you tweak what you are reading in your market and look for blog outlets that truly interest you.
It’s usually very fun to get “out there” and interact with your people and prospects on other sites. After all, those sites have the traffic you want. And you can grab more and more of it directly from them by participating in lively discussions.