Thanks for reading and your comment.

I agree, who the heck actually hires these time waster companies!

Take Care,
NIck

I think you last statement of:

“Relevant – Adds value – And as a bonus, you’ve created a marketing-related cliff-hanger.

And you won’t get kicked out of the party.”

This sums up good quality blog commenting nicely!

Take Care
Nick

I’m happy to see this coming back around; in the good ole days, it was common sense. Then the spammers & fly-by-nights came out and had some success with commenting for seo, etc.. Blog application developers then had to come up with special plug-ins, services popped up for all sorts of things, and comment moderation became tedious.

And then it exploded into cr@p. In some sense, we’re lucky that the big guys have made it clear that it’s time to change.

It’s just like a conversation in real life. You’re arrive casually late to a party. You get a drink or plate of appetizers and see a small group of people chatting away. You walk over and listen in.

Now…Let’s say they’re talking about how cool the recent commercial for the latest iPod is…Should you pipe in with “Hey! I’m running a 25% off sale on designer shoes! My store is located at…”

Obviously not – it’s ridiculous and you will soon have no new friends at the party.

However, if you said something like “I really thought that commercial was cool too. I never really wanted an iPod before, and that annoying song is so stuck in my head, I’m thinking about buying one. Seriously though, we’re actually trying to figure out a way to use a similar format on a commercial we’re building for a new product we’re launching…”

Relevant – Adds value – And as a bonus, you’ve created a marketing-related cliff-hanger.

And you won’t get kicked out of the party.

I would take your advice one step further and suggest that business owners should never hire someone else to post comments on your behalf. Many SEO firms who are committed to generating high volumes of inbound links entirely neglect the valid principles you’ve shared above.

Many SEO firms also seem not to realize (or care) that REAL PEOPLE read blogs too. Unmoderated, “spammy” blog comments are dramatically reducing the quality of the content on many sites I used to enjoy reading. A personal pet peeve! It’s a relief to see an SEO blogger with such an authentic view on blog commenting.

Absolutley right! I think the main conclusion of your post, is that it’s needs to be a valuable comment, something that adds to the conversation instead of just saying, ‘great post, thanks.’

By adding value and by adding to the conversation, you’re putting yourself out there apart from everyone else. So because of that, you don’t need a sales pitch, you just need to show that you’re someone who people might want to get to know if they clicked on your name to go to your website.

I do agree that posting on an unrelated blog isn’t great. However, if they are within your target market, it would work. For example, I comment on blogs to people that I want to reach in someway. And I have actually gotten a lot of business because of that.

They say to me, “I would have never known about you if you hadn’t of left that comment on my blog!”

As long as it’s in your target market, then you should be fine.

Thanks for the tips!

Take Care,
Nick