From Commenting to Social Media
Comments are cool, but they take forever and after all that writing, you only have a few of them to show for your labor. Comments are only created as fast as you can create them. Well, no kidding, you think. But before you think I’m simply stating the obvious, here’s what I’m really getting at: comments don’t scale. The return on time invested for blog comments can be rather limited compared to other methods of driving exposure and traffic to your blog.
Consider:
- You can only write one comment at a time on one blog at a time. This is highly inefficient unless you choose your blogs (and your timing) very carefully.
- If your comment does not engage the blogger and the blog’s readers, it will fail to drive significant traffic to your blog.
- Following comments after yours by subscribing to them is death by a thousand cuts to your ability to produce revenue: you can’t be producing and consuming at the same time. Consuming costs money, it does not make money.
- In order for you to reach a lot of people, you have to go to a lot of blogs, since centralized commenting services which write comments back to blogs don’t exist.
In no way am I down on comments! Commenting on other blogs is often something which bloggers do until it fails to effectively serve their goals. You want to build up the strongest social media presence you can while this is happening, so that you can make use of the social media multiplier effect.
A well-thought-out comment strategy is essential. One good comment at the right place and time will shovel in the traffic. This is important: if you have already been very successful at commenting, you don’t want to stay stuck in that place. There is a next step, a step beyond comments.
The Social Media Multiplier
Social media for blog marketing is a different animal. The way that many social media sites work, a multiplier effect is possible, where the effects are scalable to a high degree, but you do the same amount of work (or less).
Here’s what I mean:
- Once you reach a certain size of audience, you don’t have to ask anyone to submit your content to social media sites. Your audience will do this for you, and you simply count the traffic. Why does this happen? Because your audience is getting a benefit for themselves by doing this, but that benefit is also passed on to you.
- Instead of one link created by you to your post or blog, many links are created simultaneously by your friends and followers. Spreading your content is a way they provide value to their friends and followers, who may also spread it to yet another group of people. There’s no better example of this than the “retweet” on Twitter, where one user re-broadcasts the tweet (post) of another across groups of friends. One person can drop a link in a tweet and it will echo throughout the twitterverse (as it’s called) in just a few minutes.
- You don’t have to scramble to travel all over the web to get these benefits. You stay on one Twitter page, or you use a Twitter program, or everything happens within the StumbleUpon or Mixx interface.
Modeling the Successful
Modeling those who are successful is time-tested way to become successful yourself. Here is something to think about: do the biggest names in the blogosphere go around commenting on other blogs? No. Not only that, they hardly comment on their own blogs! They’ve reached a point where commenting does nothing for them and it doesn’t scale.
However, nearly all of them have highly active Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn accounts.
Why do you think that is? What are they getting from that?