The power of commenting on blogs

That’s the title of a post from blog expert, Darren Rowse, this morning.

Darren ran across a post from Caroline Middlebrook analyzing her blog’s stats for the month of October. Just under 700 visitors to her blog came from leaving comments on other people’s blogs.

The key to her success with this is that Caroline doesn’t spam blogs with meaningless comments – but she contributes to the conversations already happening, stays on topic and adds value to the blogs that she visits (or at least she has here at ProBlogger. Caroline doesn’t leave links in her comments – the traffic comes from people clicking her name to find out who is behind the insightful comments that she leaves.

Of course some will argue that 700 visitors isn’t a lot of traffic per month from the activity of commenting on blogs – however I think it’s actually fairly decent for a blog that is only a few months old – particularly when you consider that she’s managing to convert readers into subscribers. Add 4 or 5 new loyal readers to your blog every day (like Caroline has done by the looks of her RSS feed stats) and you end up with thousands of readers a day over a year.

As lawyers, we’re so caught up in posting content to our own blogs that we forget that commenting on other blogs may do more for networking, increased blog subscribers, and reputation enhancement.