Tools for Commenting

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?