Surprise! Blog Comments Marketing Is Not Dead.

I think the most intriguing article I’ve read over the last week was the one where Wired magazine told the world that blogs were so old-fashioned that no one should expect to launch and grow a new blog big enough to be noticed at all any more. I can honestly tell this is one of the best things I’ve read in quite a while and I can agree with Valleywag’s writer Paul Boutin (who authored the article for Wired) that the space is definitely too crowded and for the majority of people safe harbors like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr must be perfectly enough for self-expression leaving the bigger guys fight for pageviews and positions in the search engine results pages as the citizen journalism has become more professional than anyone ever expected it to be.

For quite a while I myself have thought there are a number of phenomena that were important in the early blogosphere but seem to lose their weight now that the blogosphere matures and we get new tools.

For example, do you remember how bloggers used to link to posts by other bloggers, hence sending traffic to them and having a link to your blog post from one of top bloggers could send you crowds of readers and hopefully subscribers? Louis Gray noticed back in July that this seemed not to be true any more and such links did not bring significant traffic.

What’s more, professional bloggers often tend to forget that the blogosphere is supposed to be about conversation and prefer to link to previous coverage of events or companies of their own instead of sending Google juice elsewhere whenever possible. And it is quite understandable now that blogs in fact are not even about conversation when they become professional - they are about pageviews and CPMs you can earn on those pageviews. So the happier an occasional link from an A-lister can make a novice blogger - even though it will also bring disappointment about lack of visitors rushing from that A-list blog.

Another such phenomenon that I though of as archaic was use of blog comments for self promotion by bloggers or startups/providers of various services. For some reason I thought that now that we have tons of various social media tools like Twitter or FriendFeed it is much more efficient for anyone willing to engage in some self promotion to use these tools as chances of getting your words exposed to a higher number of people are actually higher over there than when you leave comments on multiple blogs.

Of course I noticed occasional comments here on Profy or on other technology blogs where owners of various startups introduced their own products as competing to that reviewed in a post they commented on but I thought it was something only used because people behind the comments failed to comprehend how much more efficient the bright and shiny social media tools were.

But last week I noticed a peculiar thing that made me change my mind to a certain extent. The thing is that when I was reading a post on Duncan Riley’s Inquisitr I saw something intriguing in the right-hand sidebar where Inquisitr hosts a widget for the recent comments.

All the comments in the ‘Recent comments’ widget were authored by the same person (or at least were left with the same credentials) represented by a photo of an Asian-looking female as an avatar and using WAP Advertising as a name (sorry, I am not linking here, sending Google juice to this business is definitely not the purpose of this post).

Due to the time zone I work in I often see real spam in the recent comments on various blogs as an occasional spam comment manages to pass anti-spam tool while the blog owner is sound asleep in the US (and Europe and Asia still reading the blogs, me included). But this was something totally different as the comments actually looked like perfectly valid to me and actually referred to the subject of the posts instead of just saying the usual things like “Thanks for sharing, it was very useful”.

In the case of this WAP Advertising commenter (here is the account on Disqus where you can track the comments left by this person on Disqus-powered blogs), all the comments seemed to be absolutely valid, intended to add something to the conversation (or pretend to add something top be fair) and were left on posts focused on various topics instead of just posting on some subject that was related to the field this business works in.

Yet there was one thing I could not help but notice as strange - new comments were left every minute or every couple of minutes on new blog posts. To me it seemed to be unrealistic as leaving a comment to me means at the very least scanning the post itself, typing the comment itself and clicking the ‘submit’ button - which all seems to be able to consume more time than it consumed for this commenter.

The site advertised in this manner is self-described as “the leading WAP & Mobile Solutions Provider in Asia Pacific.” Obviously, the leading provider of such solutions needed some promotion as I have only found a total of 6 links from websites linking to their website in Google and the traffic is barely noticeable if we believe Alexa for a change.

As Disqus does not offer pagination, it is not possible to see exactly how many comments this person leaves per day on various blogs. But searching for the same person on Backtype comments aggregating system produced another interesting fact showing that this person was only this active on one particular day - probably leaving a total of 14 comments on three blogs (mostly on Inquisitr where I noticed it) and waiting for numerous visitors impatient to become their customers. And it looks like they have not noticed any results yet or are still waiting to make sure if this type of promotion was worth engaging in or not.

Anyway I think it is interesting watching some people still hoping to get some traffic or brand exposure using such unreliable and time-consuming techniques. I honestly thought it was already understandable that blog commenting is a very poor traffic driving tool - much worse than links in the blog posts themselves. It is also a zero in bringing any SEO benefits unless you only leave comments on the Do-follow blogs. But it looks like blog commenting is still not dead - or maybe not dead completely given that I can hardly say I notice such self-promoting comments all that often.

But still there are proponents of marketing via blog commenting with Darren Rowse probably the best-known of them. Darren’s blog Problogger is a good indication of how a blog can attract tons of comments if the blogger makes his readers believe they are actually useful for marketing and promotion. On Problogger Darren’s posts rarely get less than a few dozens of comments - no matter the subject of every post - with occasional posts getting as many as several hundreds of comments.

I believe the main reason for the huge number of comments Darren gets must be the fact that Darren himself initially evangelized importance of conversation with other bloggers via comments on their blogs and persuaded everyone commenting was one of the best tools available to get noticed. The idea must be that bloggers will see you want to engage in a conversation with them and will probably visit your blog and subscribe to pay attention to what you say there as well - next come links on their blogs and the never-ending traffic flow as well.

Unfortunately people don’t seem to understand that people like Darren who receive dozens of comments simply are unable to notice authors of such comments - let alone visit their websites or leaving a reply to their comment. And links will hardly ever come given the fact that the bloggers who receive significant number of comments simply have no time to remember every person who ever comments on their blogs.

My conclusion is simple: commenting on blogs for marketing and self-promotion is definitely not dead as there are still people who hope to get some benefits off commenting on blogs. But the only people for whom such comments are actually beneficial are the bloggers evangelizing the idea itself as they gets tons of comments and can be proud of such numbers, of course. Yet everyone venturing into blog commenting willing to get exposure will soon be disappointed and will start sending endless coverage requests to those very bloggers - hoping to eventually get a real post about their website, product, or service as they quickly realize this is the only way blogs can send customers their way.