I figured I had to go over the top with this one. Not quite sure if I have. You tell me.

I have been using Fast Blog Finder to find dofollow blog posts for me. It helps and then it doesn’t. I don’t spam. I like getting beneficial links back to my site. I use tools like this because they simplify the process. But sometimes the posts are a little bit old. And I am not quite sure of the etiquette involved. Is an older post OK to comment on? I could see refering to it from a blog post. But after a post has 20 comments, how much do you really add to the conversation if it has ended?

But I have used the software often enough to build a long list of dofollow blogs, 516 to be exact. There may be some doubles. And there may be some nofollow blogs that slipped through the cracks, but it’s pretty clean.

I have seen the blog lists. Useful in some ways. I have seen the search engines. Useful but there is usually no way to favor more recent posts. I built a dofollow river of posts out of this list of feeds, but it’s slow and incomplete. So I figured I’d give out the OPML file.

This is a file you should be able to import into any feed reader. If you can’t, you need to find a better feed reader. I highly recommend NewsGator. To filter out just topics you want to comment on, use watches.

But I also did a quick install of the Optimal OPML browser plugin for WordPress. The results of that are below. And if any of you happen to clean up the file of duplicates or add your own favorites, just pass the new file back to me and I’ll put a new version up.

The OPML of KeywordLuv and CommentLuv Blogs

I haven’t picked up the blogs who have installed these plugins in the last month or so, but here is what I have now: 562 feeds. Same disclaimer. There may be duplicates. Some blogs may have uninstalled the plugins. Etc.

Here is the file.

Update 3/25/2010

The opml files are still there. If you know how to use them go ahead. But blog comments based on dofollow should not be a priority in your link building any more. Rather make useful, meaty or controversial comments on high traffic blogs and use social media to drive traffic to those posts. In other words, contribute.

And then there is this:

Over 300,000 Dofollow Spam Comments On This Blog Alone

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I can be accused of reaching too far. I can also be accused of getting in over my head, at least for a few days at a time. But, if I had a choose between having a path laid out ahead of me or just taking steps forward like an explorer, not waiting for the rules or maps, I would choose the later.

I do like making money online. I just want it to be easier. The words that I can write at the various blogs and sites I own are only one part of the equation. The part that I will continue if I didn’t make any money.

The other parts are getting visitors and monetization. Each of these I have done well at in the past, before the blogs, by running a search engine backwards. At least that was how I thought of it in my head. If you had a network of sites that basically ran an algorithm that was a mirror of a search engine’s chances of ranking high are pretty good. If the system also matched products to content without a middleman getting a cut, chances for profitability also run pretty high.

A system of this sort would only leave writing and socializing to be done and take the grunt work out of the equation. A nice dream to have when I have built a database of over one million affiliate products. I didn’t think it was possible at first. I am still not sure how it would run on a server which had me investigating Hadoop and Sphinx.

The research for this has been relatively massive. And to the passerby on this blog, boring. But I am stubborn.

You see, I like writing and blogging. But it seems just as I get on a roll with blog posts, I have to go cultivate all my other sites for a while to keep the money coming in. This was pissing me off and this system has been in my head since I made my first affiliate sale. I am not really a salesmen and I am pretty sure I don’t have what it takes to be a rockstar/buy-this-now-or-die type blogger. It doesn’t fit me and I tend to put those two careers right up beside lawyers and used car salesmen.

Outsourcing worked to an extent, to the extent I could explain what I wanted. But for the most part, I got "WTF". I can overlook data and see how it relates. It’s dealing with the language to make it happen that’s the bitch.

So posts have been slow lately and the topics scattered and random. But that’s just the way it goes sometimes. I sort of mix myself in the topics related to what I am trying to do until I come up with an answer. I have the answer in my head. Unfortunately, my laptop can’t turn this into code yet.

These research jaunts have taught me a lot. One side project that popped out of the research lately was a Commentluv and KeywordLuv Blog Post River. There are 600 feeds in the river and it updates every 3 hours. Not bad for running on one dedicated server with 4 other sites, but then I learned the trick of using remote services instead of my own processing power. My site just serves the resulting feed.

And what the hell, here’s the mindmap I’ve been working on. It explains a lot more and started with this post.

Profit-ware is supposed to be the test case for some of the concepts I have been working with. But for a while it is sitting there. I started two blogs a long time ago before I knew how. This time I want to start one with a plan before I start jumping in and messing things up.

So I’m here, I’m slowing down to make room for the research but I am in no way out. And it’s starting to get interesting, at least to me.

This weekend I got off my butt and went down a list of things I wanted to get done.

• I built a list of blogs using the CommentLuv plugin over at my site Digital Product Review. I am just getting the final tweaks on the theme done and am ready to start getting a little more traffic. I figured this list would bring some. It only has 100 blogs on it now, but I have about 250 more links to go through, so look for updates. A large percentage of these blogs have an Entrecard widget, a second reason to check this list out.
• I put up another WordPress plugin project for bidding. It’s a simple one and I will be using it to check out developers. The plugin is a huge project, so I am getting it made piece by piece until it is finished, depending on my budget for hiring developers and my own time to add to it.
• I purchased and read The Lazy Affiliate Marketer. This is an awesome book for intermediate affiliate marketers. I finished reading it in a day. The blueprint I have used to make money through affiliate marketing is about 20% of the book. The other 80% is where I want to go. Plus I have some ideas to add to the book. So I will be writing a report expanding the book, adding a few more techniques and giving it away with future purchases. Look for the annoucement when I am done with the report.
• I did some work around the house.
• I came up with an awesome idea for my domain Dir23.com which is just sitting around collecting dust, but that is going to require some Drupal knowledge. The idea. I’ll wait until the site’s done.
• After my post about automatic related content, I have explored it more by playing around on my Squidoo account, just trying to find how many different feeds I could come up with to cluster around one concept. A laboratory of some sorts. The SimplePie plugin works great for WordPress, but it requires a little php knowledge. I have written some preprocessors for the plugin and noted all the code and will be writing a post about using it the day I make it live here, along with some ways to make money by using the plugin.
• That made me want to build a list of Squidoo-like sites: dofollow, the ability to add multiple feed and content sources, and no marketing haters. On the to do list.
• I have been questioning myself about post frequency for a while. The problem is that there is a lot of info on the subject and a lot of opinions. One thing I have noticed: work put in on posting and commenting on the weekends is usually less effective during the weekend. In other words, I get more mileage out of my weekday post. Another thing: I get a lot of comments on the post just before the last one I posted. I figured I will drop myself down to every other day posting for now, with a goal of 4 posts a week. I will have to discipline myself by timestamping post forward even when I can’t wait to publish. On the weekends, I will post a light post, most likely off topic. I write some long posts quite often. Those should be able to make it a couple of days and give me an off day for my other blog and projects. Plus, it’s close to the same amount of posts I have been getting in anyway. Might as well stop berating myself and make it the new rule. But I would like to hear opinions on the topic of post frequency because nothing has totally swayed me one way (daily posting or more) or the other (every other day or a few times a week).

And that’s about it.

There are a few things you have to do if you want to get the word out about your blog. Joining blogging social networks helps. Writing good posts help. But you will probably go unnoticed by other bloggers if you are not commenting on their blogs.

Oh, great. Another rehashed post on commenting.

Not!

I am not going to tell you how to comment or what to comment on. I am going to show you a few of the techniques I have used to spread my comments around as far as I have and to have the posts come to you.

And after I searched the blogosphere for posts to reference I realized I am rehashing a little because Caroline Middlebrook wrote a killer post on building a blog commenting strategy that mentions a few techniques that I didn’t think of. But I am pushing on regardless because I have found a lot of tools that aren’t listed in one place. Plus it makes my job easier. Read her post and then check out the tools here.

When I start blogging, I would comment here, comment there with basically no rhyme or reason. Don’t get me wrong. I left what I thought were worthwhile comments, but I would get at the most maybe ten comments a week.

Subscribe to Feeds to Find More Commenting Options

I started by collecting feeds, a lot of feeds. All Google Reader says I have is 1000+. I did this through MyBlogLog and Entrecard. I would find a blog with great posts and subscribe.

At first, I used Firefox Livemarks along with the Feed Ticker plugin. The Feed Ticker picks random posts from your feeds and constantly scrolls them across a toolbar. Most of the time, just by watching the ticker for a minute or so I would find a few posts to comment on. The issue: Using Livemarks slows down Firefox. So it’s great if you subscribe to a few feeds, but right around 600 I started having issues.

If I could, I would find a way to make this work. The randomness of the posts really helped. They worked like an artificial subconscious. I never new what was going to pop up and that gave a freshness to my comments.

I eventually stopped this and went to using Google Reader so that my computer wouldn’t have to deal with the overhead of getting the updates on 1000 feeds. I can sort all posts from all feeds by date, so the newest one floats to the top. And I can search just the feeds I subscribe to. That’s how I found all the posts I link to. And there are some tools to make using Google Reader easier:

• Get More From Google Reader
• Google Reader Tools
• An Awesome Firefox Addon for Google Reader

One site I will leave up to you to investigate, because I haven’t made it there yet and I tired of finding a perfect reader after I just found the perfect reader is favorit, which offers:

• News Reading
• Commenting
• Blog Posting
• Content Republication
• Human Powered Blog Searching

Now if any of you can find me a true OPML cleaner let me know. I have been looking for one for months. I have manually removed duplicate feeds, but no reader seems to do this well. And I mean the ability to tell that a Feedburner feed is the same as a WordPress feed of the same name. It would also have to know that adding www. to a domain doesn’t make it a different. It would be great if it could tell me if there hasn’t been a post for a month also. I don’t ask for much. Just the world.

Hop Along

Explore the blogging communities and traffic sites you have signed up for. With Entrecard, I drop from 60 to 100 cards a day. By the end of that, I have found more than enough posts to comment on.

BlogCatalog recently added a lot more features to their dashboard that allow you to spy on the social doings of your friends there. I have yet to check out all the features, but it is bound to help you find posts that you can contribute to with your comments.

Targeted Comments

This falls under the "Guns don’t kill people. People kill people" category. A lot of these tools could be used by spammers, but if used correctly can help you out a lot. Comments on blogs that use DoFollow can help you not only while people are reading the post you are commenting on, but they can also help you in the future by increase your backlinks.

The tools:

• Comment Kahuna
• BacklinkSpot
• DoFollo

Of these three, DoFollo seems the best.

Then there is the CommentLuv plugin. So by searching Google for "keyword" and "This blog uses the CommentLuv plugin", with the quotes, you can find posts that fit with the last one you posted.

Another technique that Caroline mentioned in her article is being one of the first to comment. And I have a tool for that too.

• Comment Sniper

Each of these are powerful tools if used correctly.

From Your Own Blog

And once you start getting comments on your blog, just go back through them and pay a visit to the people who commented on your blog.

So, how to you find posts to comment on?