So back in January when I launched my new website, I wanted to bring in some that early traffic and I was like, hey, maybe if I go around commenting on articles that are relevant to what I got going on that might be able to drive some awareness and get some people over to the website, see what they got going on, see if they like what we got going on and use the service. I apologize for that run-on sentence. I started it and just wanted to keep going.
So I picked five industry news websites and blogs. Not like CNN or Fox but magazine and publications. I’d go on, look at their top or new articles of the day, and leave a relevant comment.
Fortunately, all of them use Disqus. For those not in the know, Disqus is kind of like a third-party hosting for your blog comments instead of having them on your website. They’re on the Disqus servers and it’s embedded at the bottom of your articles, replacing the default comments on your CMS. Not only that, it’s a community-building thing where if I post on a blog X and blog Y the people from X can see my comments on blog Y if they go to my profile.
What you see right here, these numbers are from 19 comments that I left. I wrote them in the January to March timeframe. As you can see, it’s not an insane amount of traffic: 19 users in March, 27 and April, 34 in May.
I wasn’t leaving bunk comments.
“Hey, have you checked out my website?”
“You should go to my website.”
I spent some time actually reading the article. If not all the article at least half of it just to see what they had going on. So I would leave a thoughtful comment on something in the article. People could see my comment and say “okay this guy read the article.” 220 unique users thought they were thoughtful comments.
Some came to the website. Just a trickle, between 5 and 50 a month or so, but not bad for 19 comments left at the beginning of the year. But those 5 to 50 a month brought an average of over $100 a month. Low effort!
I had to
- read an article on something that I’m interested in
- leave a thoughtful comment
Now what I can do is say “okay, this is a viable channel, I should double down. Go find 20 more articles and leave a comment on them.” I’ll go leave 2,000 comments on 2,000 relevant articles.
In summary Commenting on blogs or articles isn’t dead if you do it thoughtfully and if you don’t try to spam them with whatever new fertility pill hits the market.
What’s crazy is I didn’t leave a link back to my website in any of the comments. I just had my name formatted so it was [Justin, website URL] and left thoughtful comments. $1300 and growing revenue from 19 comments. That’s a good return.
So get out there and leave some thoughtful comments.
Not not bogus comments like real.
Thoughtful comments.
Ciao.