Building an Online Business: Marketing Comments

Placing comments on other blogs and in forums has always been an important part of marketing. However, make sure that the forum is public to search engines.
The most famous forums – Yahoo Groups – have tons of opportunity for socializing, but no PR value because they are not open to Google.

There are a few things you need to know before posting comments as a marketing tool. First, not all forum owners let comment owners post. If they do, there is probably a no-follow link that tells search engines not to give the comment any value.

If you do find a forum that includes live links, don’t assume that you’ll get the PR value of page one. You’ll get a partial value based on the page you comment on – which will probably be very low, almost zero. It takes 3000 links on PR0 pages to increase PR from PR2 – PR3, and far too many to count to increase it from PR4 – PR5.
There are some rules for posting comments:

1. Do not be patronizing. Most of today’s comments are moderated. You are wasting your time thinking that you can spam your URL to dozens of unsuspecting blogs.

Those blogs will just block the spam and ban your IP address.

Most bloggers will ban a blog, or wont’ publish comments like:

“Love your blog, visit mine.”

“This is great. I have more info.”

“If you like this then you’ll love my product.”

2. Add information. It is unethical to take a link without leaving something behind. I suggest writing a personal story that supports the blog authors, or a piece of missed information, maybe even a supporting report.

3. Don’t add your URL in the comment box. Most blogs today let you link a URL to your username, if your username is a keyword phrase used by your blog – all the better.