Inbound marketing is fantastic, as it is generally free traffic. And we are ALL about free traffic in the internet marketing world. One form of inbound Marketing that isn’t generally done well by most marketers is comment marketing. Let’s figure out the right, and very wrong, way to do it.

Let’s be clear on one thing right here and now, the point of comment marketing is not to just slap links to your site on any given blog or page that allows comments. No. Just. No.

Don’t just spam. That makes you look awful and gets you very low quality links and traffic. You need to actually add some value with your comments and work every link in to your comments in the correct manner.

Before you start really diving in, it’s probably best to come up with a list of a good amount of blogs and sites that will actually be beneficial to your comment marketing strategy. Some criteria to keep in mind is:
• Find blogs relevant to yours. Seriously, if you are trying to drive traffic to your site about tree care, nobody on a wine and cheese blog is going to care
• Make sure they update often. I mean, honestly, is a site that publishes once a year REALLY going to drive in some traffic?
• The blog needs to have a decent traffic volume. I mean, you aren’t going to get eyes on your comment if there is no one there to read it

Now, you have to come up with an actual goal to your comment marketing (just like every other marketing strategy) in order for it to actually work.

If your goal is to gain traffic, then you need to focus on blogs that will help you with that. The blogs you comment on need to allow links to your site, not just links to your profile. Yes, people sometimes check out the profiles of people that comment. But more often than not, they will just click a direct link if it’s in the comments.

Now, many people use comment marketing to boost their reputation online. Which is fantastic and a great way to get people interested in your name online.

If you plan on using comment marketing for that tactic, then you are free to look at blogs that do not link to outside sites in their comments. What is really beneficial about using comment marketing to boost your online reputation is that you will have informative, and useful comments that add to the commentary left in the articles on highly trafficked and well known sites. Those viewing the comments to get more info dropped by people like yourself will start to notice just how knowledgeable you are, and will start to follow you as a result.

Comment marketing, when done properly, is a great tool. BUT when done incorrectly, you will gain a reputation as a spammer.

No one wants to go to the comment section of a really awesome and insightful article only to see a bunch of comments saying ‘hey look at this site’ followed by your URL. Don’t do that. Even if you see someone saying it’s a great way to get backlinks. It’s not. They lied. Don’t do it.

Make sure that even on those sites where you ARE linking out to your own in the comments, that you do it in a respectful manner, and that it ads to the discussion. Make commenting work for you, not the other way around. I use also use wordpress engine hosting when linking to all my sites.