Gadooney.com

So far we’ve looked at a couple of different ways to generate traffic to your new site while waiting for search engine results to kick in, touching on using forums to generate traffic and using outbound links.

Today we’re going to examine using blog comments to drive traffic to your website. This should be a quick one, as it’s pretty obvious, but an easy way to generate some decent traffic to your site is to be a frequent commenter on blogs that are related to your subject.

In this day and age, you can’t chunk a rock anywhere without hitting 1,926 blogs devoted to the subject, so there are likely plenty of blogs about your subject matter out and about in the world. Most blog platforms allow you to include an email address and URL when commenting, which are displayed after you submit your comment, and can be clicked through by anyone perusing the blog you commented on.

Like many things discussed here, be judicious. Don’t spam blogs with comments for the sake of comments, as something like “Great post” is pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. You’ll get more bang for your buck if you do a little legwork and identifiy the most popular, respected blogs, as they likely have the highest traffic.

When you comment, put some thought into it, so that anyone reading it will realize that you know what you’re talking about, and that the odds are good that your own site will be interesting as well and worth checking out.

Another advantage of being a knowledgeable commenter on blogs is that your comments will often generate an incoming link to your site from the owner of the blog, especially if it’s on a related subject. It’s more professional courtesy than anything else, but it’s often easier to get someone to link to you if you simply frequently comment and contribute to their blog, rather than linking to their site and sending an email, begging for a link, etc.

Search engines are trending towards (or already to the point of) completely ignoring links in the comments themselves, so don’t get caught up in thinking that “Hey, I can generate tons of links if I just comment on blogs all day.” Spamming comments is pretty much a complete waste of time, so no need to go there.

A close cousin to using blog comments to generate traffic are services like Yahoo Answers, where you can answer assorted questions that users have posted, and (for now at least) are allowed to include clickable URLs in your answer. Your mileage definitely varies here, based on the topic and popularity of the subject matter, but it’s a decent way to generate some instant traffic, if there are questions posted that relate to your site and subject matter.

Again, like blog comments you get more mileage if you put a little time into it, as your goal is to impress any user with the fact that you know your stuff. If you just slap up one line responses and a link to your site, you’re likely to get flagged as a spammer or simply ignore by most users, thus rendering the whole exercise a pretty large waste of time.