Before, one of the most effective ways to get your new blog noticed is to comment on as many number of big blogs as possible. Back then it’s not just effective, it’s almost considered as a standard. You are basically going to be considered fool if you’re not utilizing this free traffic technique.

But like anything, as time rolls out quickly, things change so drastically. The once so popular blog commenting on big blogs has somehow declined. Not that people aren’t commenting anymore but these days, you’d rather see bloggers do a guest post, run a contest, focus on writing a series post or do more productive stuffs than by being active in their favorite top blogs.

It’s Not as Effective as What It Used To Be

There are really a ton of other things that aren’t as effective as they used to before. One good example is link exchanges. 5-10 years back, it was like the only method that webmasters use both to drive traffic and increase their rankings in the search engines. That’s why people always say that the pace of an online business is much quicker than the real world ones. This day what you’re using may be still effective, the next day you’re not guaranteed it is still gonna work.

As for being active on top blogs, here are some of the reasons that I see why it has somehow declined as not as good as what it used to be.

• Poor Quality of Traffic – It doesn’t take a lot to see that most bloggers who comment on those sites do it for the lone sake of commenting. I don’t know but I’m really puzzled why bloggers like Chow allow comments such as “thanks for this interesting post” as it doesn’t really add anything. Most of these bloggers were inferred that they need to comment on 200 blogs a day so they do it as fast as they could.
• Happy-go trigger audience – This one relates to the first factor. The good reason why no one will notice your comment is because 98% of bloggers don’t really read comments of other people. They just comment and then leave, comment and then leave. Oftentimes they don’t even recognize who have written the posts. For instance everytime I do a guest post, most commenters would comment and not even think the post was a guest writeup by another blogger and not the author.
• Saturation – its plain common sense. Why does one thing work so well before than today? Because before, the method isn’t abused, its used by a reasonable no.of bloggers. But now that everyone uses it, its really hard to see a return.

</end of rant> Anyways as I was writing this post, I just thought it would be interesting to share with you a little case study on what interacting with big blogs bring to the table for me.

For the past month i have been really trying to become active lurker reader on some of the big blogs in our niche. I had observed what ZK has been doing and basically I gave myself a go. And here’s what I found out (in last months period):

From John Chow’s blog

From Shoemoney’s blog

From Carl Ocab’s blog

And from DailyBlogTips

It wasn’t ever massive but it’s a good proof that by being active on other people’s blogs you can still reap some traffic. It would also be interesting to see how different blogs have different visitors and behaviors. For instance Shoemoney’s blog, returned a bounce rate of 39% which is pretty good considering that all audience came from just reading my comment and then clicking my link.

John Chow has sent me the most no.but its hard to determine it since I’ve done a couple of guest post on that site as well. As expected it returned a higher bounce rate since most of the blog’s readers are trigger go-lucky ones.

Carl Ocab’s blog sent me a pretty nice stat to play with. His blog was like in hiatus for three months and to receive that no.of traffic and bounce rate is pretty amazing. DBT on the other hand, had the least new visits % . This means that most of the readers of that site also read my blog as well.

Importance of this

Why am I telling you all of this? You may probably have been scratching your head on whats the importance of this. Two things, first is I love playing with stats. I spend a lot of my  free time with Analytics and analyzing my logs and second is that stats can help you a lot in terms of improving the usability of your blog and eventually driving more traffic. As an old adage says,”the number will always speak for itself”. I’m a huge advocate of that.

So to conclude, yes we can still get good traffic from being an active commentator on those big blogs. But it just does not gonna happen right away, you have to be creative and make sure you’re adding good value to the community and not just being spammy. After all, we’re not just concerned about the quantity, we’re all after the quality as well.