Why should you comment on industry blog posts and articles?
In the second half of this article, you’ll discover an opportunity to increase the amount of attention you or your company can garner online. First, though, some background is needed to explain the problem, so that the solution makes complete sense.
The main problem with social media
We live in an age where it’s harder than ever to get noticed online, to get attention from customers, clients, employers and peers. Social media, in particular, has created a more significant opportunity to get seen. At the same time, there’s a considerable amount of noise that hinders valuable messages from getting through.
While attention seeking for its ends is evidence of a character flaw, there are plenty of times where getting attention is essential.
For example, if you:
-Are an experienced individual who’s competent and hardworking, but happens to be in-between work contracts, you’d like to get noticed while contributing online. Your valuable inputs to group discussions can be ‘crowded out’ by too many novice questions and spam posts.
-Are an individual who genuinely wants to help others by sharing a wealth of experience and lessons learned, it can be disheartening when you get little response. At the same time, you get faced with cat videos or unfortunate accident videos ‘going viral’ and wonder where the world is heading.
-Represent a company who has a valuable product or service that’s struggling to get traction or increased market share. It makes sense to explore every opportunity to get the message out. Companies can face the same challenges that individuals confront.
A problem that webmasters are finding
At the same time, many blog owners and webmasters complain that they get few comments on their website anymore. The massive growth in social media has resulted in the same number of visits to sites, but very little interaction in the comments section.
People prefer to join conversations on social media, rather than being the first to post after a regular article on a website. It’s understandable, as most people don’t like to be the first to do anything in life. Many also fear the chance of a wrong impression in case their comment isn’t well received.
You can help to solve both of these problems at the same time!
Yes, you personally.
The solution is to leave comments on industry related websites
If you take some time to make comments on industry-related websites and blogs, you’ll achieve far more benefit. (Than making those same comments on social media).
Here’s why:
Anyone who visits that same page after you will see your comment. If you’re in the oil and gas industry, yours will likely be one of only a few comments. Often, yours will be the only comment!
You’ll have centre stage to educate, amuse, enrich or entice people to come and see more of what you have to say. Over time, more and more people will become familiar with your name. This exposure will increase the chances of your CV standing out in a job application, or your company messages having a higher level of familiarity.
In your name or profile picture, a link can go back to your blog or company website. This backlink has the benefit of driving visitors straight back to your site. There’ll also be SEO authority benefits in that an industry-related backlink will get created. A backlink from an industry-related website has more SEO value than a social media link. A link to your blog with only one click of the mouse is more likely to lead to traffic than your social media comment. Social comments get nestled among hundreds on a social media stream, with a link that only leads back to your profile.
Action steps, do this today!
You need to do 2 things:
Set up your profile so that your profile picture and link will show up on the comments you make.
You can set up a profile on Disqus.com so that you can comment on websites that use this system. The most important place to set up a profile is on Gravatar.com
The Gravatar system got created by Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress which is the most popular website management system in the world. What Gravatar does is that when one of your comments includes your associated email, it populates your profile picture automatically.
Your Gravatar profile can also have plenty of information about you, including all your social media links, and so on. You can also upload your picture.
Once you’ve created a Gravatar picture, each comment that you make will get reinforced by your image. Everyone reading your comment can see that you are genuine and standing behind your words.
Find some websites to leave comments
When commenting on an article or blog post, there’ll be some login system. The most common ones are WordPress, Disqus, and Facebook commenting systems.
There’ll be benefits in posting useful comments on any industry-related website or any commenting system.
… The best ones to look for are the ones that are the simple ones that ask for your name, email, and website.
If you’re in the oil and gas business (as many of our visitors are) then here’s a list to help you get started:
http://blog.schneider-electric.com/oil-and-gas/
http://www.albertaoilmagazine.com/
http://www.drillingcontractor.org/
http://www.oilholicssynonymous.com/
http://www.evaluateenergy.com/index.html
http://theamericanenergynews.com/
When you comment on someone’s blog, it’s usually the case that your comment will get held in moderation. One reason for this is the amount of software-generated spam that gets posted to most blog sites. This spamming is done to create brand citations and links back to the spammers’ site. Another reason is, so that irrelevant, inappropriate or abusive comments never end up being published. When the blog owner or webmaster goes through the comments and decides what to delete, a profile picture helps the chances of approval.
Other people are more likely to interact with your comment if it looks like a human wrote it — people like the personal touch. Especially online where communication can feel impersonal. Even if you’re dealing B2B, obviously your future customers are people too!
Sometimes a comment field has a choice of whether to log in with Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, or several other software options. Have you ever typed out a comment that disappears because the login failed? If there’s an option to enter your email address and the home website, it saves time and stress. If you’re already logged in to your Gravatar/Wordpress account, it might keep you from logging in with a different account as the active login will get detected.
Your Gravatar account itself is a page on the internet where you can have links to your blog, website and social media accounts. If online omnipresence and reputation management are essential to you. Fill out your Gravatar account fully and have another positive internet billboard to advertise yourself and your company.
Your Gravatar only needs to be set up once, and your profile page and picture can help you permanently.
The most significant benefit in commenting on blog posts and articles is that search engines will index these pages and visit for many years to come.
A helpful comment or insightful observation from you today could get read by business partners, peers, or employers many years from now. This exposure is in stark contrast to social media comments that disappear in the stream, never to get found again.
PS If you’ve a website or blog that accepts comments, feel free to mention it below in our comments section!
