What an interesting question. This brings up the ethical side of the Refletcive Marketing discussion. Are you really engaged in Refletcive Marketing if you’re leaving comments on blogs? And, are there better practices and worse practices?
Blog Comment Marketing — if there is such a thing — has earned such a poor reputation because people have abused it, either by naively running around to various blogs and leaving unuseful comments or simply by spamming the blogs with fake comments for the sake of embedding links.
Technically, if whatever you put on another Website sends traffic to your site that is Reflective Marketing. But not all Reflective Marketing is good. Blog comment spam is not only disrespectful of other people’s hard work it violates search engine guidelines.
You may have to fall back on Reflective Marketing because you’re not getting much traffic from search engines but you absolutely do NOT want Reflective Marketing to be the reason why your search traffic dies off.
Reflective Marketing Through Blogs: The Basics
Commenting on blogs for marketing purposes is a parasitical practice. If you’re going to use other people’s blogs for Reflective Marketing it’s better to publish guest articles/posts on those sites. Sure, I have warned people against abusing guest posting but it’s essentially a legitimate practice when done right.
Always respect the other person’s Website when you leave content there, whether it’s a guest post or a comment. Make it content that is likely to bring people to THAT Website.
If you’re going to use blog comments for marketing then I recommend that you do this only on Websites where you are known to the site operator and a trusted commenter. I don’t mind when other SEOs with whom I am familiar leave occasional links on my blogs; they are respectful of the audience I write for and they strive to provide good information. I don’t care if the link is self-referential if it’s making a relevant point.
And not all Reflective Marketing requires a link. Think about it. If Michael Martinez comments on a Tolkien or SEO Website the chances are pretty good that at least some people who visit those sites have heard about me. The responses to my comments, if polite and trusting, may lead people who have NOT heard about me to search on my name in connection with whatever topic is being discussed.
Encourage people to search for you within a narrow topic by showing them that you have something useful and helpful to share on that topic. You don’t need to point links to your Websites to do that.
Of course, many blogs allow us to embed a link under our names and I usually provide one when I leave a comment. But the blog owner has the option of not showing those links (they can go in and manually delete them if nothing else). So if you don’t get the link, will your comment inspire at least one person to find out more about you?
That’s the most important aspect to using blog comments for Reflective Marketing.
Can We Target Blogs for Reflective Marketing?
Frankly, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. You can spend your time creating value on other people’s Websites or you can spend your time creating value on your own Websites. If you’re out there commenting on everyone else’s blogs, you’re not creating much value on your own blog.
Effective marketing is useless if it builds an audience for a worthless product or service. Your Website is the product you’re trying to build an audience for (or your client’s site is). If you’re not allowed to touch the site (which is the case for many SEOs) then you do have to build audience and create visibility.
But being a proxy commenter for clients is a very risky business. For one thing, your IP address is not going to line up with the Website address. Sure, a lot of us surf from home or on mobile devices now so people are not paying as much attention to IP addresses as they used to. But if you’re selling your services as a proxy commenter the chances that your IP address have been logged in an anti-spam database are pretty significant, and they increase with each marketing comment you leave.
So the Law of Diminishing Returns may kick in and you’ll see a decline in the number of blogs where you can leave those reflective comments. Furthermore, if you’re trying to stay within the scope of “relevant” Websites you’re going to run out of relevant blogs fairly quickly.
This is not an efficient practice. The only people who can do it on scale are link spammers who let software find the blogs and leave the comments — and frankly very few of them are hoping for traffic from clicks on the links. They are just focusing on inflating their search rankings.
Reflective Marketing Builds Audience
The true power of Reflective Marketing is in its ability to create trust and visibility for you on other Websites beyond your control. You want to build good relationships with those sites and their communities so that word will spread about who you are and what you have to offer.
So wasting an opportunity for Reflective Marketing through posting a cheesy “marketing comment” is about the worst thing you can do in reflective marketing. You’re not just getting a link. You’re not just showing people you exist. You’re standing up on someone else’s soapbox and saying, “Here I am! Listen to what I have to say!” You better make sure you have something worth listening to because people will quickly learn to tune you out.
I’ll discuss some Reflective Marketing metrics in my next post to help people better understand how they can organize and manage a reflective marketing campaign. It’s not a simple numbers game by any means.
Reflective Marketing is NEVER about getting links.
Read More about Search Engine Optimization
How Long Does It Take Google to Credit A Website with Links?
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