Blogs and forums have the best potential for leaving comments.

Blogs

In blogs, they usually ask for your name, email address, your web site address (URL), and your comment. When the comment is approved, they link your name to your web site, next to your comment.

If they do not ask for the website URL, they can’t link to it and you don’t get any goodness from the comment. Look at other comments on the site and check if any of them are linked to external sites.

It is possible to put your URL in the comment itself. Sometimes it automatically becomes an active link and sometimes it just sits there looking like text. At least someone could copy and paste it, but that’s 3 steps harder than a real link. Check other comments to see how it works.

If you just throw your URL in the comment, it looks kind of spammy, so I wouldn’t do that. If there was a legitimate reason to put your URL in there, you might get away with it.

In order of effectiveness: 1. a blog that links your name, 2. a good reason to put your URL in a comment that is linked, 3. a good reason to put your URL in a comment that is NOT linked, 4. no reason to put your URL in a comment that is linked, 5. no reason to put your URL in a comment that is linked, 6. writing your comment on a piece of paper and leaving it on the sidewalk.

The 10 for 10 Challenge

One thing you might be tempted to do, if you’ve read my SEO book, is use your keywords as your “Name”. The good thing is that your site gets the benefit of not only getting a link, but the link is for your keywords. The problem with this is that everyone knows you are playing the system if you say your name is “Handmade Jewelry”. You lose credibility with the readers and the blog owner probably won’t even approve that comment, so you’ve wasted your time and annoyed the owner.

If you are a FireFox user (and why wouldn’t you be?), there’s a plug named “easyComment”, for the browser that populates common blog comment forms automatically. Install it, fill out the preferences with your name and URL, then any time you are on a blog post with a comment form, click the button and your name and URL are put into the form.

easyComment can be downloaded from here: easyComment https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9095/

Forums

Forums are a bit different. Again, check to see what others are doing and how the links work. Usually, you will have to create a profile with a “signature”. The signature is a bit of text that is inserted at the bottom of each of your posts, like a signature. Put your URL in there. Link it using your keywords if possible.

It’s possible to put your URL into the body of your post, but again, don’t just throw it in there. Have a good reason for mentioning it. “I was just discussing that very issue yesterday on my blog. See my post here: http://www.yoursite.com/post.html”. That’s a reasonable thing to do.

Try to use your keywords, but not too blatantly. Make sure they are giving you a real, working link. Check the other comments and posts to make sure you understand how that site works. Be interesting, genuine, authoritive, humble, and helpful.

You do want links for their SEO goodness, but you also want real people to be interested enough to come check out your site and start a conversation. Write for real people first, then review for keywords for the search engines second.

Now, go out there and leave some comments!

The 10 for 10 Challenge

This does two things. First, it builds inbound links to your site, boosting your SEO and ultimately getting more traffic from search engines. Second, there’s an immediate effect of having the site owner, other readers, and commenters become aware of you, which might lead them to check out your site, using the link in the comment.

This works for both other blogs and for forums. It also works on Facebook and Twitter, but I’m not convinced that it works as effectively there. Maybe you can prove me wrong on that point. There are a lot of people who read this site that have Etsy shops. Their forums are a great place to post.

I want to help you out, my precious readers. I want you to have a direct benefit from reading this blog. So, here’s what I’m going to do.

The Challenge

I’m announcing the “10 for 10 Challenge”.

Post at least 10 comments on other people’s sites for 10 days in a row. That’s a total of at least 100 comments.

Document the number of visitors to your site on the day you start and at the end of the 10th day. That’s 10 full days of visitors.

The Prize

Whoever has the greatest increase in those 10 days will get a promotional article on my site, including an interview with you, a review of your site and your products, and a link in the sidebar on walton.com, (which is great for your SEO.)

The Rules

You need to have Google Analytics installed on your site, or another statistics program that can be verified.

The 10th and final day must be on or before July 12, which is 2 weeks from the day this article is published. That will give you a couple days to get the statistics program installed if you don’t have it already and you can do a little research for where you want to leave comments. If you want to start now and pick the best 10 days to get your maximum number, you can do that too.

Send me a screenshot of the statistics program, show the number of visits for each of 10 days in a row. The site with the greatest increase in the number of visits between the first day and the tenth day will win.

That’s not a percentage, it’s the number. It’s not the number of page views, it’s the number of visits. It’s not just the 10th day either. It’s the first day compared to any other day within 10 days. If you have a bump on the 7th day, then it declines, take the number on the 7th day. We’re looking for the greatest increase.

The actual comments that you leave are not verified. The only thing we’re counting to win is the increase in the number of visits.

Email me with your results. Show me a screenshot. The winner will be determined based solely on my judgement and my decision is final.

The Strategy

The way to make this work is to know your market. Research where they hang out. Search Google for your keyword and the term “forums” to find forums related to your product. Use your keyword and try searching for “best keyword blogs”. You can search for just your keyword, note the top 10 results, and see which are blogs or places that accept comments.

Once you have a good list of places to leave comments, hit them all, every day. See what people are talking about first. Don’t just jumps in with “Please visit my site”. No one cares about that. You need to be helpful. Answer questions. Be an authority. Give solid information. Ask great questions. Be that interesting person at the party that everyone wants to talk to.

The Benefits

If you are not using a stats application now, you should be, and this challenge might push you into doing that. Going through the process of looking for sites to leave comments, then actually leaving them, will get you into a great habit that will SEO your site for the long run.

If you leave 10 comments a day for 10 days, you WILL have more traffic, regardless of this challenge. You may not win this, but you will have more traffic. Everyone who attempts this challenge will have more traffic.

At the end of the day, isn’t that what it’s all about?

As recently as a month ago, I was a victim of a state of mind I call Analytics Dismissal Disorder.

This mindset is common after hearing about the importance of analytics, installing the tracking code and then getting overwhelmed by all of the graphs and scary numbers.

When I suffered from analytics dismissal disorder (which my doctors called A.D.D. for short), I knew Google Analytics was important but avoided the extra effort necessary to learn how to get the most out of the software.

This post explains what I needed to learn to get over this.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/overcome-the-google-analytics-learning-curve-in-20-minutes?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+seomoz+%28SEOmoz+Daily+Blog%29

Michael Martine,
Blog Coaching & Consulting,
Remarkablogger.com

He’s always got great, solid, down-to-earth advice. You should check his whole site out if you are serious about blogging. His focus is on business blogging, actually making money from a blog. He’s a consultant and will help you through whatever questions you might have.

He’s one of the few blogging experts out there that will give you the real deal, without the hype.

Sometimes, I forget to cover the basics, like why blogging is the perfect small business marketing tool, then other people remind me and all I have to do is point at them.

Go read the whole article.

Blogging is the perfect small business marketing tool. If you’re selling and gaining leads via the web, then the web is also your main marketing super-channel. How to do people locate what they need online? Two ways:

1. Online search
2. Word of mouth through online channels like email, blogs, and other social tools (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Read the entire article at:
http://remarkablogger.com/2010/06/01/why-blogging-is-the-perfect-small-business-marketing-tool/

On video there’s nothing to hide behind. It’s your verbal stumbles and nervous laughter and futzing with the neckline of your shirt. It’s your face, your wrinkles, the miscombed part in your hair. Your crooked smile and teeth and glasses. Your weird mannerisms. Your messy office.

You’re not doing videos, because video is you.

But let me tell you my secret.

Letting everyone see you naked, in all of your imperfections, is exactly what make video so delicious.

I’m naked in every video I’ve posted online. In all of my dorkyness, everything I would love to improve via diet and exercise and a few intensive sessions with a voice and acting coach. Every bra strap foible, the phone ringing in the background, the fire trucks sirens on the street outside my apartment, the way I keep forgetting my train of thought, the annoying way I play with my hair.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.lauraroeder.com/2010/05/let-them-see-you-naked-on-video/

We watched the new Food Network Star TV show on Sunday. They picked a bunch of people that might be good for TV, then make a TV show about giving them challenges, and eliminating them one by one, until they get down to the one person they will give their own TV show on the Food Network. Everyone wants to be a star.

It was great to see all these fresh faces, trying to do a promo to a camera. I mocked and laughed as they stumbled and got nervous in front of the camera. I love watching reality TV, just to judge people, and to feel better about myself, while they fail.

Then I decided that I could do way better in front of a camera than they did. I’d make my own video for this blog. Ha!

Videos can help bring more traffic to your site. The technology is easy. That hard part is getting in front of the camera.

Here’s my first video blog post. Wow. Way harder than it looks.

Mock away. (Please tell me if you have problems playing the video.)

You can watch it on YouTube here.

At the end, I ask you to leave a comment and tell me what the most valuable thing I ever did for you was. I told you to ask your customers what their needs, wants and desires are, so I figured I better ask you that same thing.

The tribe has spoken. Please leave a comment. Thanks.

I told her the best way to get them to find you is to submit a “sitemap.xml” file. WordPress can do this easily.

If that made no sense to you (and it probably didn’t , then go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ and submit your site that way. It’s quick and easy.

After you do that, get a “webmasters” account per the book. You can track there how your site is being crawled.

Now, that would have been a great answer except for the part where I brush over the “Worpdress can do this easily” part. I kind of forgot to explain that one.

To make the answer great, I want to direct your attention to the “Google XML Sitemaps” plug in for WordPress (and away from the fact I forgot to put this in earlier.) Download it from the WordPress site and install it as any other plug in. There are a few settings that are pretty self explanatory. It’ll be fine even if you configure it poorly.

Once it’s installed and configured, every time you add a new post or a new page or update an existing item, it will update the sitemap.xml file and ping Google to tell it that there’s a new map.

Don’t forget to get that Webmasters account and follow how often they crawl your site.

If good relationships are built on good communication, this is the best way to communicate with Google.

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Read the entire article at:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

The math is magical: you can pile up lots of failures and still keep rolling, but you only need one juicy success to build a career.

The killer is the category called ‘neither’. If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you’ll never have a shot at success. Avoiding the thing that’s easy to survive keeps you from encountering the very thing you’re after.

And yet we market and work and connect and create as if just one failure might be the end of us.

Read the entire article at:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/04/failure-success-and-neither.html

I once had a sales job doing cold calls to sell advertising on phone book covers. I never made much money at it, but I learned very valuable lessons that I’ve used ever since.

I learned that I made one sale for every 3 calls. It just worked out that way.

It hit me that I shouldn’t be afraid of making the call, afraid of rejection. I should LOVE rejection because it meant that I was one step closer to a sale. More rejections equaled more sales. If I can get rejected twice, I’ll make a sale on the next one.

It got to be a game, to try to see how many rejections I got. I was happy when I got them. Store owners would be amused that I was so happy when they told me no.

Are you afraid of failure? What one thing would you do if you weren’t afraid?

Read that again slowly. “Blog more often” correlates with “more customers”.

An underutilized blog means customers are being left on the table. The survey this year shows a direct correlation between blog post frequency and the chance that a company has acquired a customer through that channel.

Read the entire article at:
http://bit.ly/aewfHr

Among the 7 people who followed directions and commented on the post was this from Tess Richardson:

After months of procrastinating over the SEO thing, I downloaded your free guide and started getting busy. In the two days I’ve been searching out, and talking on, sites related to one of my Etsy products, Google analytics has shown a jump from 0 to 132 page views. I can send you a screen shot if you would like it.

Thanks for the advice and encouragement, Conrad.

Click to see the whole chart.

This kind of feedback makes me crazy, so I had to follow up and find out more. Please visit her site. Here’s the interview she gave me. The book she refers to is The Simple Guide To SEO.

What prompted you to download the SEO book?

Tess Richardson

I was–until Dec. 31 of last year–a communications and marketing director for an employee benefits consultant. I am not new to some of these concepts, but I had never tried them before and did not have a comprehensive understanding of them until I read your free download. Before that my knowledge consisted of bits and pieces: use really good keywords, inbound links, converse on other’s sites/blogs in a meaningful way. I never had time to put this knowledge to work at my previous job. I really needed someone to put it all together in terms I understood.

When I saw the post in the Etsy forums, I thought I’d give it a look as it sounded like what I needed.

How would you describe the book? Good points? Bad points?

I love the glossary. I love the light, readable style. I love that it’s free! (I kept wondering, “What’s the catch?”)

I LOVE the checklist toward the back, but it doesn’t seem to be in the same order that things are discussed in the book. That bothered me.

I would also like to see the checklist broken up into “Things to do RIGHT NOW,” “Things to do next week,” “Things to do next month,” or something like that. For newbies it’s a lot to digest in one sitting, even if it is all well-explained. I have gotten a start, but I did skip over some of the “sign up for this account and that account” things. I mean to get back to them, but I just picked a couple of tips at random and jumped in. Many people are not comfortable doing that, I suspect.

What did you learn from the book? What stood out?

One thing jumped out at me right from the moment I skimmed it, before I downloaded and printed for later digestion: You must have a blog. Since I’d been hemming and hawing for months on whether I should start a blog, what would be the focus, what free blog site should I use, would it be a waste of time (and all the other second-guessing) that was like a bolt from above. I set up my blog 2 days after reading the book. http://homespunlife.wordpress.com

Another thing was about using bold and italic. I had never read that elsewhere.

Tess Richardson at her Ashford Spinning Wheel (aka My Precious)

How did you find the sites to comment on?

A little background on my Etsy site…I started with rosaries, then added homespun yarn, then got a great idea for a charm bracelet based on a young adult trilogy, The Hunger Games (THG) by Suzanne Collins. A friend turned me onto the books, which are really starting to gain traction and may be the next BIG THING, like Twilight, but there is almost no merchandising yet. Even though I hope to really establish myself in the homespun yarn market (hence my blog focus), the bracelets seemed like a way to bring in some early sales since it was an untapped niche with an eager market.

I thought about where I could find my target (tweens and teens who loved the books) and started Googling for fan sites. That got me a few hits, so I began visiting them, getting a feel for the audience, what was discussed and how open I thought they might be to shameless self-promotion. Some I had to join, like Facebook fan pages and Fanpop.com.

How many comments did you leave? How much time did you spend?

I was afraid I would have to spend weeks becoming a familiar and accepted visitor to these sites, but teens and tweens are pretty open to anyone with something to offer that strikes a chord. I seriously just posted once to the sites I visited this week. Since I’m a fan of the books, I was able to “speak the lingo” about characters, and be authentic, not fake. And I tried to be humble, not pushy; just another fan who wanted to share this great tip about something others might like. And if I had to register to post, I chose a fan-specific username.

It was time consuming, though. I spent an entire morning on it earlier this week and maybe posted on 4-5 sites total.

What was the biggest obstacle in starting from nothing to getting 132 page views?

Having to register for some of the fan sites. I’ve got enough usernames and passwords to keep track of!

What was the easiest part?

Actually, it was all pretty easy. I believe in my product and think there are a lot of girls who would love it. Since I am a fan of the books, it was not hard “hanging out” on the fan sites.

What surprised you the most?

The fact that my Etsy product page doesn’t show up on Google, but my one post on Fanpop.com make it to second place, on the first page overnight!

What advice would you give someone else with an Etsy shop?

Some niches will be much harder than others to see results on. For example, my homespun yarn is going to be an uphill climb because the market is so full of competitors. But it’s something I’m passionate about, so it’s no sweat to read and comment on other people’s spinning and knitting sites. Really, the challenge of developing a unique product and finding that “blue ocean” is harder than the SEO stuff.

Any other comments?

Having spent time chatting up my Hunger Games bracelets on fan sites makes me look at my future product offering with new eyes. I realize, for example, that I don’t really want to spend time chatting on Catholic sites and will probably drop rosaries from my Etsy shop. On the other hand, I’m thinking of maximizing my time spent in finding and joining Hunger Games fan sites by developing other products for HG fans. New products will give me more legitimate reasons to revisit and repost, so I’m not just the nag who keeps hawking her stuff over and over.

Another thing I’m really excited about, having tasted just a bite of success, is that I am in the progress of self-publishing my first novel–a historical fiction. My head is already buzzing with ideas for getting out there and making online connections with history fans.

Thanks, Tess!

If you want more information about Tess, please visit her sites:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/ColdHandsWarmArt
http://homespunlife.wordpress.com/

What did you learn from this story? Did you learn that if you leave interesting comments on other people’s sites that you might end up getting a lot of attention for your site? Would you like to leave a comment now, after reading the interview, and tell us all what you learned? I thought you might. Thanks!

If you haven’t read the book yet, you can download it here:
The Care and Feeding of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO

Have you ever told someone how you feel about their blog post?

Have you ever left a comment on a web site?

If you have never written a comment on a web site, on a blog post, then you are missing the easiest way to get inbound links to your Etsy site and increasing your SEO.

The biggest factor in SEO is “inbound links”. The more, the merrier. You want as many links pointing at your site as you can get.

Almost every time you leave a comment on another web site, it will give you the opportunity to link back to your site. This works for your Etsy site. This works for your own web site.

I know you like to lurk, to read and not get involved. Most people do. It’s easier. It’s safer. No one will disagree with you if you don’t say anything. No one will make fun.

Remember being 13 and going to a school dance? It was scary. I stood against the wall and wished I had the nerve to ask someone to dance. When I finally did risk humiliation, I found out that it was kind of fun. It didn’t hurt at all. I actually liked it.

As you grow up, you find out that having friendships, talking to strangers, just any communication, it’s all pretty good. There are the occasional awkward moments, but you get through them. There’s much more benefit to talking than to staying silent.

In the Internet, the same is true. If you leave comments for people on their sites, they might check out your site and leave you a comment. They might start a conversation on their site.

Every comment you make links back to your site.

Now, if you talk too much, you can get a little overbearing, so don’t get carried away and make your self a pest. Be natural, like you would in real life. You know how to talk to people in real life, so do that same thing on web sites.

Also, not every web site offers the link. If you talk to someone, but they don’t want to talk back, then find someone else to talk to. Comment on the sites that allow you to input a link to your site.

Imagine improving your SEO, just by talking. How easy is that?