By Maria Castle
Although anyone can get their way around comment marketing principles, not everyone has the right strategy that elevates the success of their business. Comment marketing has quite an atrocious reputation on the web, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot make it work. These tips (which have been tested and proven efficient many times before) will help you conduct a successful comment marketing campaign.
1. Identify Clear Goals
The first step of building a successful campaign is usually where things go wrong. Many marketers get into the online world without a clear concept of what they want to achieve. What’s your purpose for starting with comment marketing? Do you want to attract more traffic towards your website, spread the word about your brand, or build relationships with webmasters? Once you have the goals identified, it will be easy to conduct a focused campaign.
2. Consistency Is the Key to Success
Instead of devoting a specific period of time of your day to write comments, you should set the actual number of comments for the day and make sure to stay committed to that routine for an indefinite period of time. You only need 4-6 comments a day, depending on what goals you are trying to reach and how quickly you want to notice the first signs of success.
3. Provide Comments with Value
Otherwise, there is no purpose to start commenting in the first place. The main idea of your comment marketing campaign is offering solutions to people’s problems; that’s the only way to attract them towards your website.
4. Leave a Signature
When someone reads a comment you left, finds it useful and wants to get in touch with you, they will want to see your contact info. If you add a signature that provides your title, name and web address, you will make it easy for everyone interested to contact you. In addition, disclosing your contact information will make your comments look more trustworthy.
5. Comment on Well-Rated Posts
Clearly, you want to leave comments at places where many people will be able to see them. The first thing to do is search Google for relevant blog posts, articles and forum threads, using keywords associated to your website. Once you locate Google’s top results, you can start commenting on those publications. That’s a certain way to get your comments seen by a decent number of readers.
6. Leave Comments at Sites with Great Monthly Traffic
It would be wise to limit yourself to sites that have an estimated monthly traffic of over 10,000. The reason to avoid sites with low monthly traffic is that they don’t expose your comments to a decent number of viewers. Of course, there are other things to look at besides monthly traffic: the social shares the website gets, the readers’ commenting activity, and more.
7. Leave Questions Unanswered and Add Mystery
If you provide a clear solution with the comment you post, you decrease the chances of people clicking on the URL. There is a simple way to add a sense of mystery to the comments you write: you always leave an impression that you know more than what you are saying in the particular comment.
8. Identify Target Blogs and Become a Regular Commenter
If you intend on attracting a particular webmaster’s attention, then you absolutely need to start commenting regularly on the posts at their website. Once you become noticed, you can start an effective communication and the chances for a successful collaboration will be greater.
9. Don’t Leave Offensive Comments Unanswered
This is all part of your comment marketing campaign; you will come across comments that are outright hateful, repulsive and obnoxious. If you have been part of the Internet world for a while, then you already know that every commenter has the right to sound like an expert. People will try to prove you wrong and criticize your comments with ridiculous arguments. Instead of getting frustrated, you should learn how to turn these comments into your advantage.
Before you increase the tension with your response, you should take a look at what other people have written in the comments and make sure to provide value for them. By adding compelling and intriguing ideas in your answers, the comments will stand out. Don’t allow other people’s opinions to make you sound hateful; stick to professionalism and only write comments that solve problems.
10. Subscribe to Email Lists
This step provides a great advantage; you will get immediate notifications about new posts and articles published at the particular site. When your comment is among the first ones written on the post, there are greater chances that more people will notice it.
Comment marketing campaigns are not as straightforward as they initially seem. You need to have a strategic, professional approach and stay committed to your goals if you want all that commenting to have a successful outcome.
