Header graphic for print
Real Lawyers Have Blogs On the topic of the law, firm marketing, social media, & baseball

Comment protocol : One link to yourself

One message loud and clear at the Blog Business Summit was to comment on other blogs frequently as a way to draw traffic to your own blog.

Denise Wakeman, a blog marketing consultant I was pleased to hook up with at the Summit, shares some advice on commenting protocol. That’s one url link to yourself is enough.

There is generally one field to put your URL.

Some people do put their URLs in the body of the comment and though I don’t think there is a hard and fast rule on this, many bloggers consider this to be spam, especially if it doesn’t contribute to the conversation or provide a resource related to the topic of the post.

Yes, you want inbound links from the blogs you’re commenting on, and you want to be respectful of the blogger. Some bloggers may delete or not approve your comment if you stuff it with extra URLs. Personally, I’d stick to putting one URL in the field provided unless I was including a link the comment box that added to the conversation.

You’re spot on Denise. When I get comments with multiple links, it’s clear to me they’re looking for incoming links rather than engaging in a discussion. Of course there’s exceptions when people point out things via url’s.

Also take note that professional blog platform’s like LexBlog’s use comment spam filters. Multiple url’s are flagged for spam.

And what says Denise on commenting?

We always advise our clients to be commenting frequently on blogs of similar topics in order to get known in the blogosphere and to create inbound links to your own blog or website.

I’ve got to start doing more commenting. I have noticed an increase of traffic to my blog when I do so, especially when it’s a comment on a high profile blog.

Technorati Tags:

  • http://www.legalandrew.com Andrew Flusche

    Honestly, I never would have thought to put my URL anywhere but the provided field. That’s what it’s there for, right?
    Comments are an invitation from the blog owner to the general public to join in on the discussion. But part of that invitation is the requirement that you participate in the discussion, not just try to draw people to your blog.
    With all that said, what I have done is post an article on my blog, then put a link to the article in a comment on someone else’s page, when the blog didn’t allow trackbacks. This may be crossing the line, but the blog owner didn’t seem to mind, and it seems to be in line with the comment/discussion idea.

  • http://kevin.lexblog.com Kevin OKeefe

    A link back from your own blog post is a good idea Andrew, I have done the same.
    In addition, when commenting on a post, turn it into a post on your own blog as well. Say you were commenting over at X blog to a post of Y’s about Z. Nice way to create some interaction.

  • http://www.buildabetterblog.com Denise aka The Blog Squad

    Kevin, it was great meeting you at BBS and thanks for sharing my thoughts about commenting. Seemed to stir up a bit of conversation. I think the bottom line is not to abuse the issue by including unrelated URLs.
    BTW, I think your contribution to the small business blogging panel was the best and I hope we can find a way to collaborate in the future.

  • Alex

    hello