Last Updated on June 21, 2021 by scottkandh
I was looking for information on how I can improve comments on my blog. This post provides information regarding two distinct things:
1. Backlinks and
2. Comments.
Table of Contents
Backlinks / Link Building
One of the most beneficial things that I came across was a quote from Blogging Joy:
Blogging joy
“I hope you like this article and find these websites useful while building a backlink for your blog. Just make sure not to overdo anything. Try to make things naturally to get good results in the long run” –
What attracted me to that site is I was getting caught up with a program called CommentLuv. After reviewing the comment above I’m going to let it run its natural course and I have given up on trying to find blogs that have CommentLuv enabled. Because despite many places saying that this blog or that blog has CommentLuv isn’t true anymore. I don’t know how old of a program it is, but the plug-in is very useful that when a user comes to your site, they can leave a copy of one of their Top 10 posts for others to view.
This whole thing of back links, link building, follow, and no-follow is all very new to me. So bear with me as I try to put all of this information that I’ve digested into my own words. I have looked at a few programs to help provide traffic for the purpose of building up the number of page views per day to your website.
It’s my sincere hope that people visiting this post after reading it will be encouraged and motivated to leave a comment.
What is Link Building?
Link building (simply put) is where you get mentioned from someone else’s blog that points to your site. The process of building links to your site is not an easy task, it takes a lot of time. If your able it’s best to get one strong link with a high domain authority rather than 10 links from sites that have low domain authority. To the best of my knowledge the information I’m getting ready to tell you refers to the technique of off-page SEO.
What is off-page SEO?
This information from SEMRush, an industry leader in SEO helps to explain off-page SEO
“Off-page SEO, in short, covers all SEO tactics that take place outside of your own website.
It is often thought to just be link building, but in reality, there are far more off-page SEO tactics that you should be using if you want to gain a competitive advantage.
Tactics such as brand building, citation building, content marketing, social media, and more all play an important part in a comprehensive SEO strategy.
But as a simple explanation of off-page SEO, this covers any tactics that you use that don’t involve making changes to your own website or publishing content on your own site.
These signals help both search engines and users to gain a perception of your site’s authority and are also used as key trust and relevance factors.
Think of it like this:
- Your website = on-page SEO
- Another site or platform = off-page SEO”
Above is: From What is off-page SEO? A Comprehensive Guide.
Netotraffic provides 40 ways to build link building. I’m not familiar with many of the ways that he suggests to build links so I’m going to concentrate on the ones that I have heard of and would recommend to you.
1. Create infographics.
A visual representation of the highlighted main points from your blog post. These increase your blog traffic and are extremely popular. To get an idea of an infographic you can visit Pinterest or Canva. For example, see the example Get a Free link building Infographic.
What you’re doing in a sense is making a lot of text (especially for complex things) and transforming it into a graphic pin that has test, images, and it should be attractive to the viewer.
Some places are looking for infographics so you can visit the places below to add your infographic (if they decide to add it, is up to them). But it’s worth a shot to build extra traffic if they decide to publish it and you’ll get more links.
Submit your infographic to some of the infographic directories listed below to increase the chances of getting more links. The only one that appears to be free is the first one.
http://www.coolinfographics.com – submit your infographic with the contact form.
http://dailyinfographic.com/ – I couldn’t figure this one out.
http://www.infographicsonly.com/ – this one isn’t free, it’ll run you $89 as of 10/20/20.
http://topinfographic.com/ – I wouldn’t suggest this program, you would need to remove your site from the graphic. “No links are allowed in descriptions of free submissions.”
2. Twitter:
I’m not a big Tweet fan. But for those of you that are into Twitter this might be a good way to get out the word on your blog.
3. External Links:
When your writing posts, find external links to sites that are authoritative by looking to see if they have a high domain authority. The best thing to do is to try and refer to other pages that are in your same niche.
4. Provide Testimonials:
Put testimonials on your homepage. Nearly every user will see your website testimonials if you place them on your homepage. As the very first page on your site, it’s often your users’ first impression of your business, and including positive words from customers can sway them in your favor from the beginning.
5. Creating web tools:
If you have the experience to create web tools and offer free online tools that would be an excellent way for link building. For example, many Pinterest bloggers use the plug-in Milo-Tree Pop-up. One of the things that I’m going to be looking into for future use is a Free Microsoft Access Database form for bloggers to use as a Master Blogging Content Database. I have one now that I designed for my personal use, but I still have a lot of finishing touches before I decide to publish it.
6. Sending an e-mail to featured blogs mentioned on post
If you’ve written a post, send an e-mail to the blogger and make a note to them (including a copy to the link) to politely let them know as a courtesy that you’ve mentioned their blog in your post.
Sample Template:
Good (Morning / Afternoon or Evening). If you have the blogger’s name, put that in there too.
I wanted to let you know that you were mentioned in my blog post: 30 Awesome and Easy Ways to get eyes on your blog and inspire 1000-page views. (name of post) – at https://pinartwork.com/30-awesome-and-easy-ways-to-get-eyes-on-your-blog-and-inspire-1000-page-views/ (the link).
7. Write Round-up posts
As the term implies, you’re rounding up information from experts (online entrepreneurs for example) in the field to answer a single question that people are pondering to find out what the answer is. And then share those answers with your readers. It’s a good way to get some quality links.
A good example of this is I was trying to find answers to SEO in terms of why should you optimize your individual posts and pages and how to use SEO effectively.
8. Set up an RSS Feed for your blog
This information (Creating RSS Feeds for Your Website) provides an overview on RSS and how to set up an RSS Feed.
“RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or it’s sometimes referred to as Rich Site Summary … Most popular sites news sites and blogs provide RSS feeds for you to subscribe to. All you need is a feed reader [like Super RSS Reader mentioned below] to view its contents …
You can also create feeds for your own website so your audience can subscribe to them. If you update your content frequently and promote the feed effectively, it can help drive more steady traffic to your website.
For webmasters this is an excellent way to bring repeat traffic to your site. Think about it….every time a web surfer opens their RSS reader to get the headlines for all the sites they monitor, they’ll also see your site’s updates.”
A good reader plug-in for WordPress users for RSS Feed is Super RSS Reader. Once you’ve installed and activated the plug-in go to Appearance > Widgets and place the Super RSS Reader into an available sidebar or footer.
What’s your RSS feed address?
WordPress is another site that offers a free blog equipped with RSS feeds. So if you have a WordPress site, your RSS feed is … yourdomain.com/feed (without a period at the end). Although your able to put in an RSS feed to other RSS feeds like headline news, sports, etc. my suggestion is to keep the link limited to your blog posts.
Once you’ve created your RSS feed, submit it to Top 80 Blogging Tips RSS Feeds on Feedspot and hope for the best. Maybe you’ll be featured there soon.
9. Use the plug-in called CommentLuv for when you make comments
This information is straight from the CommentLuv premium website (the premium version is in the works to match updated PhP for WordPress).
“The commentluv plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit. [NOTE: Some bloggers have it set up so that they’re protecting against spammers, so you’ll have to read the specific instructions to prevent the spammers.]
It has been found to increase comments and the community spirit for the thousands of blogs that have installed it. With a simple install you will immediately start to find new and interesting blog posts from your own blog and community. You will even be able to build your list/network/community even more by offering your readers the opportunity to register to your site to unlock advanced features of the plugin like being able to choose from any of their 10 last posts when they comment or other features like dofollow links and more.
The plugin will work with administrators and logged on users provided they have their homepage (URL) set in their profile page (i.e. update your Gravatar) in the dashboard of the site.” I initially didn’t have my blog URL in the Gravatar profile and once I put it in there, the plug-in started working.
Some comment etiquette
a. Make sure your comments are relevant to the blog so that it gets approved.
b. Writing a comment doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily be approved so it’s not a guaranteed automatic link back to your site.
c. Write your comment directly to the author. Don’t write “this was a great post.” Write something to the effect what you intend to do with one of the suggestions from the blog post and how you’re going to implement that in your blogging strategy.
Update 10/24/2020: I’m not going to change the name of this post because I added one extra plug-in to this post. This post is worth mentioning because of the services it provides by notifying people that have commented that there’s a reply to their comment. Isn’t that cool? When people reply to your comment you can go back and see what they have to say. It’s called Comment Reply E-mail Notification.
10. Add internal links to your popular posts/page
A good way to strengthen your domain is to add some internal links from your website to your popular posts/pages (including your home page) that are doing extremely well (which can be done by looking at your number of social shares).
11. Guestographics
To be honest with you, I’ve done blogging for close to 4 months and I’ve never ran across this term before. It’s a similar method of using an infographic that was discussed by Brian Dean from Backlinko.
The trick to this method is that you aren’t sharing your Infographic (in the e-mail). You’re asking for a link to your post that comes naturally. This technique as indicated by Netotraffic “Claims to have better response and much more [added] links.”
There are five steps for this method.
First: Publish the infographic on your site.
Secondly: Find sites within the niche of your infographic.
Third: Write a personalized e-mail (about your infographic) – preferably 90 words or less asking if they’d like to see the infographic. Don’t confuse this with Step 5 that actually includes a contextual link to your Infographic and is 250 – 300 words (for the Infographic).
Fourth: Offer them unique content (in Step 5). This is an important point, here you give some added value to your Infographic and the post/page’s value as to what’s referred to as “the bribe”.
This is a tailored introduction, 250-300 word for the infographic (written by you) so they don’t have to do any more work and they can plop into their blog post.
It serves two purposes:
1) They’re able to view the Infographic (that’s published on your page) and 2) they have a ready script to add to their blog.
Lastly: Get (and send) your contextual link. With regular infographics, you get a link that’s embedded into the infographic. The Infographic (by itself) is much less valuable than a contextual link. Because the contextual link is surrounded by relevant content to your Infographic.
Because you’re writing the introduction, the chances of getting a contextual link are much higher. I’m looking into whether the introduction for this needs to refer to your own blog or the one that you want to put the link.
Sample tailored introduction:
I discovered Search Engine Optimization was very important to understand as soon as possible to get a good handle on it, and I highly recommend you start to apply it early in your blogging endeavors. You don’t have to master it, but it’s going to be very helpful in the long run.
If you’re a new blogger, this beneficial post helps you learn about SEO from PinArtwork.
This round-up post features a checklist for using SEO on your blog and a bunch of suggestions, tips, ideas, and tricks to boost your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Pinterest or your Blog. It provides an SEO Audit guide in the form of various checklists and uses step-by-step instructions to strategize your SEO like a professional. There’s also a new feature to bring your SEO to the next level with a Headline Analyzer evaluating the performance of your headline & provides suggested keyword banks: emotional, uncommon, and power word banks.
It goes into details on how to effectively use the Yoast SEO plug-in to boost your SEO.
I’ve highlighted 11 creative ways to build links out of 40 that were suggested. As Netotraffic pointed out and I’d like to remind you:
“Be open-minded for the possibilities [that] exist in link building and …use the ones that best work for you.”
Netotraffic.com
Now we’re going to take a transition from talking about backlinks and link building to discuss commenting on blogs.
Commenting on Blogs
The information in the next four paragraphs from Lifetime Flux on How to do blog commenting for traffic is presented to you to reinforce the importance of leaving comments on other blogs for the purpose that it builds backlinks.
“Blog commenting is most important for backlinks. Blog commenting consistently on other blogs can increase your blog traffic over time. I know the feeling when you are first starting out as a blogger and you are not getting enough traffic to your blog through search engines. The reason for this is most likely because your site doesn’t have enough authority on search engines.
Blog commenting on other bloggers post will help create backlinks for your site, which will in time generate traffic to your site.
What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are links to your webpage on other bloggers pages, in the comment section, and more. Having your webpage links on other bloggers pages allows you to get a higher ranking on major search engines like google. Backlinking can be done through blog commenting and it helps gain traffic.
If you are getting links to your content from other sites, this will benefit you and your blog site in so many ways. It will help your content rank high naturally through search engine results. Your goal should be to create links to an individual post by other bloggers linking to your post or Blog commenting to your homepage to gain traffic”
A word about Comments
- Having comments on your blog provides value in the sense that sometimes readers will scroll down your post looking for instant gratification to something they’re researching at the moment
- Having more comments gives you a higher ranking in search results. They do this by providing additional keywords to your blog post and adds to your content.
- Having more comments on your blog makes it look more popular. For some odd reason, people don’t want to be the first to leave a comment. They want others to make a comment before they do. WPKind who wrote how to use CommentLuv to get more comments describes it as a herd instinct: People love to see that lots of other people enjoyed the blog post before they did.
- Bottom Line: Blogging is about one thing – “Getting traffic that converts!” – Stray Curls
Install the Plug-in CrowdSignal
CrowdSignal is a plug-in that you can add to WordPress. From within the Gutenberg editor, you can add a poll right to the post/page. For an example of this in use, visit my blog post to vote for Mary Ann or Ginger – the age-old television debate that has been going on for over 50 years.
Getting people to your site to leave a comment is half the battle, the first part about the battle is getting people to your website/blog in the first place.
7 Ways to encourage Blog Comments
Elna from Twins Mommy wrote a post that generated a ton of comments called: Upgrade your Blog Comments by going this one Traffic generating Tip.
1. A Simple thing to drive traffic to your Blog.
Elna found a way that increases your chances of getting traffic by up to 500%.
When leaving a comment instead of just using your first name, use your first name and the name of your blog.
Here’s some examples:
- Scott @ PinArtwork
- Scott|PinArtwork
- Scott at PinArtwork
NOTE: Don’t put the “.com” in the name as it could trigger the spam filter and you don’t want your comment going to spam.
2. Headings
Use Google Analytics by Monster Insight Plug-in. It has an additional built-in program within the program called Headline Analyzer to significantly increase the likelihood of you getting clicks to your blog. It even provides you with a score and you can try variations of different headlines to improve the score. The Headline Analyzer suggests a score of at least 70% or better to get more clicks.
3. Have a Call to Action (CTA)
Tell your readers what you want them to. It’s typically located at the very end of a post.
Your posts will have more engagement if they’re located at the end of every post.
Why? Because they help open a conversation from what they just read.
One good example is: Now it’s your turn – tell me what your favorite social media tool is and how it’s helped your list grow. Now it’s your turn – you (as the author) need to provide the rest.
This CTA is specific and helps a reader mull over your question and give an insightful comment.
How not to end your CTA? Did you like post? That requires a simple yes or no answer. It doesn’t help in building content like I mentioned earlier to build your search ranking.
4. Use Active voice in your blog.
Second person for Pinterest pins: On blogs it’s best not to use first person. However, for Pinterest … Using the first person (I, my) instead of second person (you, your) tends to do better on Pinterest. I don’t want to mix these up for you. I’m not an English major so there’s a pretty good explanation of this on my SEO blog in the Grammar section (under Readability).
5. Readability, spacing, headlines, font size, etc.
Again refer to the SEO page that was referenced above.
6. Provide useful content:
By providing tips, tools and strategies to your readers, there’s no question that they will comment on your post.
7. Commenting plug-ins
Consider installing CommentLuv on your site. It’s a win-win for both parties since the commenter (coming to your site) gets to advertise their latest post and you get a comment on your post.
Why are comments hard to get on new blogs
from Stray Curls – 17 ways to get tons of comments
- When you’re just starting out, it can be hard to get blog comments because you’ve been blogging for a very short time, i.e. no one knows about you yet.
- Until you build authority in your niche and post consistently for a year or so, these are the tips you can use … to gain you a whole lot of blog comments.
- Use a comment system that you are actually comfortable using
- In the time I’ve spent clicking on 3 squares that show me street signs, I could take my dogs out for a walk or write a novel.
- You’re going to be driving people far away using that cursed Captcha.
- Instead of Captcha to avoid spammers, install Akismet. It is a really good plugin that filters spam comments and trackbacks.
- And it’s one of those 1-minute installation things that will save you years-of-hassle monitoring comments.
- Make sure to include tons of pictures/screenshots and lots of [bullet] points if you’re doing list-based posts. They’ve very catchy.
These are 3 type of posts that do surprisingly well when it comes to comments. They are:
The three aforementioned types of posts are explained in the hyperlinks.
Don’t write for the sake of providing information to your blog. Sage advice from many bloggers is quality over quantity and “write good, solid content.”
Pay it forward – comment on other people’s blog – but remember to be sincere in your comments.
For example, start a unique comment thread by directly writing to the author …
You are not only helping other Bloggers grow by shining more light to their posts, but you are also building relationships with other bloggers (which really helps you grow as a blogger).
[To do item for you], spend some time each day or every alternate day to comment on a few blogs in your niche.Here are some tips for writing great blog comments.
- Address the author of the blog post by name. Take the time to get to know the person who’s written that great blog post that’s actually helped solve your problem.
- Compliment him/her & mention one (1) take away you’ve picked up from the blog post.
- Add your own thoughts.
- Finish by signing off with your name and if relevant you can add a link to your website at the bottom. Don’t forget the new hint (i.e. Scott | PinterestArtwork) without the .com
Install a Gravatar
It’s weird when your name pops up next to an anonymous picture. You’re not going to stand out with an anonymous picture. It’s difficult for people to put a name to a faceless picture.
Before you start commenting on other people’s blogs and expect click-backs fix this.
Take the time to set up a Gravatar. Elna Cain explains why a Gravatar is important and how to set it up which you can read here. NOTE: If you use CommentLuv you’ll need a Gravatar.
Always aim for a question that gets the reader to talk about themselves. That’s what we as people love doing, we love to talk about ourselves.
Share on Social Media
Now, once you’re done publishing your Blog post, you’ll realize that your work is only half done.
Nobody is going to know that you’ve written a post unless you actually tell the world.
My favorite social media is Pinterest. It’s the whole reason why I start blogging in the first place after I got addicted to using Pinterest.
How to double your traffic for these posts
Either use a plug-in to look at your popular posts or use Google Analytics.
Simply create 3-5 different vertical pins for each blog post, and slightly modify the title. Then pin it on Pinterest. Voila! You’ve just succeeded in doubling your Blog traffic!
Better yet, create an Infographic to put into your Popular Blog posts and pin it to Pinterest. Infographics do superbly well on Pinterest.
Call to Action Time.
Here comes the moment that I’ve been dreading. My biggest fear about writing this post is that it wouldn’t get any comments.
I sincerely hope that I’ve done my job my encouraging you to leave meaningful comments, especially on this particular post since it deals with leaving comments.
Related posts on my website:
30 Awesome and easy ways to get eyes on your blog
25 Blogging Tools for WordPress
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