One of the most basic link building techniques and lowest hanging fruit is still blog commenting. Most people of course still get that wrong. They already mistake the means for the end. The goal is to get included in the original post, not the comment link in itself.
How can you comment to get an editorial link?
In the past blog commenting was much more common. Nowadays people tend to share and debate on third party sites aka social media. There are of course pros and cons to doing that. One disadvantage of social media “commenting” is that you usually won’t get included in the article you referred to even in case you added something of value.
The good old days of blog commenting
Just a few years ago it was very common to add an additional resource or a clarification (often with a deep link) in the blog comment section.
By now automated SPAM and the social media star have almost killed off valuable blog commenting. That’s a sad development viewed from the blogger perspective. As a blogger you will often end up with mistakes, broken links or missing resources in your posts. I blog a lot and thus commit many mistakes or forget some important aspects you’d have to mention quite often.
I wish more people would step in and help a blogger out.
Apart from my personal stance on that issue, it’s still somewhat probable to get included in the original post. Blog commenting for editorial links is a bit difficult but let me tell you how it can work. To show you how you can succeed I’d like to cite two comments from an article I published a while ago. They both almost made it to the original post but didn’t in the end. I’d like to explain why.
Examples of almost perfect comments
First off the post was a bit off topic: Free Webfonts That Don’t Look Fuzzy
My blog deals mostly with SEO related issues so my audience is not very interested in user experience matters. That’s a mistake in my opinion but because of that I haven’t even bothered to share the post with my social media audiences on Google+ or Twitter. Thus only my regular readers have commented. One of them was Luna Spinetti from n0t SEO:
- With #1 Luana creates a connection by directly speaking to me. In other words she reminds me that she’s a regular reader and she knows me and the blog. Of course I’m more attentive.
- She starts the comment with #2 the link, a good idea because in case I know it and have decided not to include it the rest of the comment might be irrelevant. I didn’t know that site.
- Then she goes on to explain in #3 why I should check it out. The fonts being “nice” is probably not enough, but she goes on to tell me that they are “clean” in contrast to “fuzzy webfonts” I was dealing in the post introduction with. Last but not least they are hosted “linkable” webfonts I don’t have to download, upload and mess around with , etc. So she convinced me already but she goes on to praise the solution. She could have skipped that part.
- With #4 she makes sure to stress that she has read my article and doesn’t only write a monologue of what she knows.
- With #5 – by adding her name – she further enforces the impression of a personal letter written to me.
The Open Font Library rocks indeed. I started using one of their webfonts on my site ever since. So why didn’t I include that stellar resource? It’s too good. It’s actually an alternative. It means you don’t have to read my post and can go there instead. Indeed I planned a follow up dealing with that site and the fonts there but the resource is not suitable as an addition to the post itself.
The other one was Owen Hogarth of Blubee SEO: I won’t mark the important text snippets in red this time you can probably spot them now by yourself:
Owen is adding a resource too – indeed I have come across that site already prior to his comment – and also explains why it’s valuable in a clear short sentence. Why didn’t he make it into the original post? The fonts on Font Squirrel are great but they are not webfonts, they are downloadable-free fonts. Only some of them are available as webfonts but then you have to look closely where to get them, etc.
The ideal comment
My post has introduced four clean webfonts for body text and two sites that host them. The ideal comment would have included a fifth “not fuzzy” webfont you can get both at Adobe and Google or even better a third free webfont site that offers all for webfonts mentioned. That would be a “must add” resource.
Of course both Owen and Luana didn’t really aim to get included in the original post.
They are just helpful readers who add something from time to time to my posts. That’s probably the main reason why the comments didn’t “succeed”. Nonetheless you can learn a lot from my genuine supporters.
How to comment for editorial links?
So what exactly should you keep in mind to make blog commenting as part of an outreach campaign?
Be concise
Very long comments can be successful. For example I sometimes even made a comprehensive comment into a post by itself. That’s a very rare case though. I’m not even sure other bloggers would do that. So what you want is to keep it short and simple. It’s like an outreach message. Do not add fluff but focus on the message you want to deliver. Here’s it’s the link itself and why it should get included in the post.
Be on point
Many commenters make the mistake of very broadly speaking. They do not really refer to the post itself but speak their mind in general or add what they know based mostly on the headline. Make sure to really read the post in its entirety when commenting to get a link back. Then target a very narrow piece of the article you want to add something to or you want to clarify.
Be very specific
As suggested above: do not just provide a general comment on the topic. Refer to a very specific aspect of the article you comment. Add a resource which is very similar to the ones cited in the original post. When the links in the post are a, b, c add a “d” not a “z”. Be so relevant that your comment can’t be ignored.
Provide an addition
As noted above you have to provide a useful addition not an alternative. Don’t say “your resources suck, mine is better” but “your resources are great, I have another great one to add”.
Offer a clarification
Make sure to stress that you “agree, but…”. Nobody wants to be called out below their article and some writers have been cussed a lot in the past or even trolled so they are wary of any negative comment. My own comments on other blogs usually do not get approved when I dare to express a differing opinion. So
when clarifying ensure that you are very polite and only disagree with one specific item.
Stay constructive and explain why your suggestion might be a better idea than the original one. Bloggers often do not have a lot of time to research their articles so that they will gladly let you offer the better solution in case you do it right.
Add a deep link not a hp link
In my examples above both links are leading to the main page of a site. That’s OK sometimes when it’s a tool or something that works right on the homepage but in many cases a deep link to the specific page or resource is even better.
In case you want to make sure not to get automatically blocked do not add a real link
but just plain text equivalent of the URL without the http:// etc. Example: example.com/resources/specific-resource.html
Add your link or a third-party link
In most cases you won’t have the appropriate link to add on your site. You will far more often be able to add a third-party link which doesn’t stem from your own site. That’s not a problem though. Good bloggers will add a credit to you and your site as a thank you.
Indeed that how my blogging career started back in 2006. First I added some third-party links in the comments
to Google Blogoscoped, by then a top 20 most popular blog in the world according to Technorati. Then I wrote guest posts for them. Finally I got inspired to create my own blog, SEO 2.0 – the rest is history.
(CC BY 2.0) Creative Commons image by Michael
