How To Increase Your Site Traffic

Traffic to your web site is the life blood of your internet business. In terms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you can get a reasonable amount of decent back links to your site every day just by commenting on other people's blogs. They don't even have to be high PR blogs, although that helps. But just having more back links doesn't necessarily bring you in more traffic directly. Sure, eventually you'll build up enough links to make a difference to the search engines, but that can take quite a while. What you want is a method of bringing in traffic quickly, while also getting the long term effect of the back links. [more...]

How would you like to increase your site traffic?

It’s easy. You can do it with blog comments – this is one of the worst kept “traffic secrets” online.

So let me put it another way…

How would you like to make your blog comments even MORE effective than they are now?

Traffic to your web site is the life blood of your internet business.

In terms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you can get a reasonable amount of decent back links to your site every day just by commenting on other people’s blogs. They don’t even have to be high PR blogs, although that helps.

But just having more back links doesn’t necessarily bring you in more traffic directly. Sure, eventually you’ll build up enough links to make a difference to the search engines, but that can take quite a while.

What you want is a method of bringing in traffic quickly, while also getting the long term effect of the back links.

Before I tell you about the tool to help you do this, let me tell you the principle behind it.

You go to a blog, you read a post. You see 20+ comments. You read the first four or five, or maybe more if they’re short comments, and then you either skip to the end to make your own comment or you decide to leave. (Don’t ever do that, always leave a comment, it’s a free back link.)

But notice what I’ve just described.

You read the first few comments. You ignore the rest – most people do that. Some people (me included) will sometimes click through to see what else the comment writer has to say.

Aha! Catch that? If you’re in the first few comments, then you have a good chance of getting someone to click through to your site.

Free, fast traffic, plus the long term benefit of new back links.

To make this work for you, it’s vital that you make sure that it’s YOU that makes one of the first few comments, ideally the very first one. There’s a little bit more to it than that though. You need to not only make the first comment, you also need it to be something that people might want to click.

So your comments have to be both relevant and interesting enough to make people want to read more about what you have to say – I’ll cover how to do that in another post.

So how do you find out about blog posts as soon as they happen? Email isn’t fast enough… Well there’s a little tool you need to help you do this.

You install it (Windows only I’m afraid) and it sits in your system tray monitoring the blogs you tell it to, usually the popular ones in your niche. Every 5 minutes, it checks the blogs, and pops-up a little box if there’s been a new post.

You can then quickly read the post on the blog, spend a few minutes composing a suitable reply, and most likely be the first to make a comment on the new blog post.

Ta-daa!

When the blog owner notifies his mailing list by email a little while later, you’ll have already beaten everyone else to the punch, and they’ll be reading your comment when they arrive. If it’s good enough, they’ll be clicking through to see what you have to say, and you then get your chance to capture their name and email address.

Don’t you just love this method? 😉

You can get the tool by clicking here.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood

8 comments

Frank, that’s good advice as always. It’s something I already know about and do, but I didn’t know about the tool to give you “first mover’s” advantage on getting a comment in there.

As you rightly point out, most of us read a few comments and then skip. So if you’re not in the top few, you’re not in.

A bit like Google!

I’m going to take advantage of the information you’ve offered and grab the tool. For anyone sitting at the computer all day doing various bits of work it’s an ideal way to get some actual benefit from the blog comments you do make.

After all, if you’re going to to the trouble to make the commments, you might as well get the best ‘juice’ from them as you can.

Work smarter, not harder, right?

Good mantra that.

Amin

Jamie Ratliff

Frank,

Thanks for the reminder about Blog Comments. I never really though about being one of the first to post a comment so my comments get more views. Great idea!

Jamie

Mike Gates

Frank,
That is an interesting tool, and the price is right 🙂

Another benefit of leaving comments is that more and more bloggers are allowing “Do Follows” of comment links, which can help in page ranking.

I know you are a member of the “Do Follow” movement and I have just become a member myself – just blogged about it 🙂

Mike

John Cussons

Frank,
You always have great information. I look forward to EVERY email.

This great new tool comes at a perfect time as I am launching a new site.

I think I am #3 to post, really nice to be at the beginning of something good.

Cheers
John

Frank Haywood

Amin:

Absolutely! If you’re doing it anyway, you might as well make it really count.

Jamie:

Not strictly my idea first, but it’s something that occurred to me a while back but I couldn’t do anything about it.

Mike:

I think you’ll like it. And I’m certain you’ll be telling your blog subscribers about it. 😉

It seems that only Google takes any notice of the nofollow tag anyway, Yahoo and MSN just go right ahead and index it. I reckon it won’t be long before Google ignores it too.

John:

Why thank you, I hope to do some “blow your socks off” stuff over the next few weeks, and I’m even getting my eldest son involved in one exercise (he’s 10). I’ll report on that when I have some results.

-Frank Haywood

Graham Cox

Comment Sniper is a fantastic tool. I’ve been using it on my marketing blog for a month or so and it’s really helped me drive traffic to my site through comments.

Graham

crikey.. six people have got comment sniper already! hope that we aren’t on the same blogs.

cheers

Geoff Robertson

Hi Frank and others comment writers,

If you get this far down the comment heap you must be pretty keen. So how can I reward your persistence? Hmmm!? Perhaps it would be useful to know that “It is dangerous to run with scissors”.

I hope that helps someone.

Cheers, Geoff