Many Web marketing expert lay special emphasis on the practice of utilizing blog comments as a core marketing strategy to enhance online branding and visibility. On the one hand, the strategy can fetch valuable user participation and spontaneous content to a business site and offer a worthy outlet for site managers to access domain specific bloggers, comment-enabled communities and other relevant communities or user groups.

But then, it can also prove to a source of undesired spam activity and inferior quality contributions from non-serious users and nuisance makers. Given the scope of its both usefulness and nuisance, this strategy demands careful handling and expert observation. In this context, let us consider a few important aspects.  First and foremost, it is worthwhile asking, why push commenting on your business blogs. The obvious answer that comes to one’s mind is the need for online branding and awareness.

Blog comments will certainly get your site consistent contribution from readers. This is an assured way of building a mutually beneficial relationship with bloggers. Their participation can generate awareness among the audience of your blog, including comment readers, consistent interactors and influencers. This can prove to be a positive marketing move, depending on the domain/ industry you are operating in and your desired end goals.

Another visible benefit is added direct traffic that the move can bring. Insightful comments with quality links, especially the well-written one can definitely prompt users to click a link (instead of simply being a random/ spammy/ irrelevant link drop) will ensure sustained traffic. If the blog post continues to receive good amount of traffic, this can well act as a good source of useful referrals to your website or specific webpages.

The direct impact of this is visible on your SEO strategy and obviously overall search rankings of your site.  Certain blogs employ ‘dofollow’ links in their comments, which are approved, whereas a few others might opt to send search ranking value. It’s generally, however, that a majority of these links are not looked at as significantly as normal links from the point of view of the search ranking. Yet, leaving a link, which is so valuable and useful, and the one that the blog writer edits a post to incorporate it is most definitely SEO accretive.

Then there is second-order marketing impact that cannot be ignored. Many of the benefits that you might get from blog commenting are not tangible or directly impactful. They slowly surface. For example, the newspaper reporter who will follow up on a particular comment for more detail to add it in a story, the link to your post that is drawn from another top blog elaborating on a comment, etc.

These are some of the obvious and apparent benefits of blog commenting that you must take into account, while implementing the strategy.