Leaving blog comments can get exposure for an information product launch: Day 24

Reprinted from a blog post of Phyllis Zimbler Miller as a National Internet Business Examiner.

When looking for exposure (read “free publicity”) on the Internet to promote an information product launch, there’s an additional “blogging” alternative to actually writing blog posts and guest blog posts.

(Remember, I’m looking for free publicity for the July 1st launch of the Miller Mosaic Internet Marketing Program.)

That additional publicity technique is leaving comments on other people’s blog posts.

Agreed, this can take time to read the posts and then write a valuable contribution even in a sentence or two.  (But not “Great post!”  That doesn’t count.)

There are actually two different main advantages to leaving comments, especially if you choose blog posts that relate to what you’re promoting or to your brand.

Let’s discuss the first reason – exposure in front of the readers of that blog post.

I belong to Backtype.com and I get a notification when Backtype picks up one of my comments.  Here are my most recent blog comments.

And below is the comment I left after reading Brian Clark’s post at Copyblogger.com (BIG TIME blog) — “How to Turn Affiliate Marketing Disclosure Into a Selling Point.”

Thanks so much for this important post. I immediately added the following sentence to my recommended resources list at http://www.InternetBizBlogger.com:

The above recommendations include affiliate links.

This is not the most helpful blog comment I’ve ever left, yet it does a good job of validating what Brian Clark posted about and saying how I acted on his advice as well as giving a link to this blog.

(And at the time I added my comment I was the 12th person to do so.  A few hours later there were many, many more comments because this is such a popular blog and this was such a valuable post.)

Now there’s a second reason for adding blog comments – getting links back to your own website. Especially links from blogs such as Copyblgger.com that has a lot of “authority” in the eyes of the search engines.  These links add to the importance of your own site in the eyes of the search engines except for one problem.

Here is a paraphrased explanation from Idea Lady Cathy Stucker at BloggerLinkUp.com on the problem of nofollow and follow links:

Most blogs use “nofollow” links in comments, which means a tag is inserted in the link of the person commenting that tells the search engines not to follow or count the link.  This means that your website gets no search engine advantage from your leaving a comment.

Nofollow became the default for most blogs because spammers discovered getting links by making blog comments was easy.

To tell if a link is nofollow look at the code. If it is something like [a href="http://IdeaLady.com/" rel="nofollow"] it is a nofollow link.

Because most blogging software automatically inserts the nofollow tag, you have to make a change to get dofollow links by eliminating the nofollow tag.

In other words, if you are leaving comments for the second reason – to get what’s called “link juice” for your own website – not every blog provides you with this benefit.

Now there are ways to quickly tell whether a blog has nofollow or follow links.  And some people use this information to only leave comments on blogs that have a follow link.

But I don’t check for this because I don’t think it’s that important.  People reading your comments can still click through to visit your website, which is the free publicity we all would like.

And what else have we been doing for the launch of the Miller Mosaic Internet Marketing Program?

This post is already rather long, so I’ll leave a report of our activities for the next post.

Tagged as: Backtype.com, blog comments, Brian Clark, Cathy Stucker, Copyblogger.com

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