We want blog comments. We crave comments. We go to great lengths to get comments. Are blog comments really that important?
Related and recommended post: Blogging Has Grown Beyond Just Comments
Blogging And Internet Marketing Niche
As bloggers and/or internet marketers, we know the value of blog comments; both on and off of our blogs. The value of blog commenting help bring the members of these groups [bloggers/IM] together in the masses. It’s a fantastic thing to witness and to be a part of. We have a rolodex full with online friends that most niche sites cannot even dream about. We have fierce competition yet we come together to help our competitors because they have became friends and we understand the value in that as well. Blog commenting has a lot to do with sparking those friendships, along with social networking.
Niche Blogs
Niche blogs are a completely different animal. It’s much harder to gain that same user interaction in the form of blog comments. The difference is, of course, we’re dealing with blogger/customer or blogger/reader rather than blogger/blogger. Niche blogging can be very frustrating but just as rewarding. As bloggers, we crave that interaction but those visiting our blogs have little to gain for the effort and are visiting our blog for different reasons. Outside of the blogging and online marketing niches, few people understand the need to leave a comment unless it’s to ask a question. Even many niche bloggers don’t know enough to reciprocate when other bloggers comment on or link to their blogs.
Forget About Blog Comments For A Minute
Generally speaking, people go online for two reasons:
- To find the answer to a question.
- To be entertained.
Let’s take a look at niche sites that never get a single quality comment. Are they simply a failure? Isn’t that how we, as bloggers, grade other blogs? Absolutely not! Or, at least, it shouldn’t be.
For example, letâs say you have a niche blog for a Limousine and Livery Service. You get few comments and you begin to wonder why you even bother with the effort involved in maintaining a blog.
Another example, in the same niche, is by a good friend of mine that happens to own a limousine business, Extreme John. John may not get a lot of comments on Insane Limos but he knows the value of a niche blog and works it like crazy.
There are a few reasons that the blog may be very beneficial to your business. These benefits are not always readily apparent.
Search Engine Traffic
We know that Google loves blogs. Blogs do very well in the SERPs (search engine results pages) when maintained properly with fresh content and a little optimization.
Customer Service And Relations
A blog attached to your business website can help give your customer and/or website visitor exactly what they want – information. Blogs are a great way of delivering testimonials, frequently asked questions, introducing new products or posting promotions and specials.
ReCap
So the next time you feel discouraged because your niche blog is getting few blog comments, remember the other reasons to maintain a blog. There’s even a continuous debate among certain bloggers whether or not we should even allow blog commenting at all (I don’t support that theory unless you are just using the blog format without the need for an “actual blog”). A few popular bloggers already have disabled the commenting feature altogether. Other bloggers have comments automatically turn off for older posts to help prevent comment spam.
Try This With Your Niche Blog
Rather than concentrate on blog comments, focus your attention on quality & original content, SEO, building traffic and, more importantly, serving your customer. Work social media for all it’s worth and build an email list ($). The payoff can be very high once you begin to dominate your niche, comments or no comments.
I’d Love To Read YOUR Comments
Do you have niche blogging sites? Do you get a steady flow of blog comments? What are the reasons you blog in your niche?
We Have A Winner
Rewarding And Highlighting The Best Blog Comments
This blog post topic was inspired by Paul Abbott‘s comment yesterday. For that we thank him. Paul has won a free copy of the Talking To A Prospect e-Book.
Related and recommended post: Blogging Has Grown Beyond Just Comments
About Brian D. Hawkins
Its true that niche blogs receive very less comments. But they receive a lot of traffic from SERP. Unlike this niche, finding fellow bloggers in certain other niche’s is very difficult, at least that was my experience. And as you say, they do not want to collaborate! But I do get a lot of comments in my personal blog that is there for entertainment purpose.
Great point Raj, I almost mentioned personal blogs as an exception but I felt the post was going too long. I’ve had the same experience with personal blogs, an interesting post can get a lot of interaction.
Thanks Brian. I have been very interested in niches for some time. So your post was very helpful to me.
Glad to help Dave.
I agree with Raj.. niche blogs somehow is tiring (for me)..I find hard times of creating a good content for it :/
Hi Herbert, niche blogs can be tough to maintain, especially if we’re not very familiar with or interested in the niche.
I agree 101% Sir Bryan…
Hi Brian. Nice that you are covering the other side of the blog commenting coin and keeping niche blogger encouraged. Depending on the topic of the post, there are times, when there isn’t really much more left to say. For example if you did a review of a product, people coming to your site from Google might not have tried the product or never even heard of it – so after they buy the product chances are they aren’t going to remember to come back and comment on your post. But at least you made the sale 🙂
Good point Ileane, and some posts that get little interaction may be the ones helping the most people.
I absolutely agree on that point Brian. I see this all the time and I never look at how many comments a blog receives as a sign of success.
Even on my own blog, although its about making money online, its usually geared towards beginners, so many of these beginners are just looking for quick information and wanting to get a feel for it. So, they dont comment a lot. I get around 3000 UV a day, but only a handful of comments, which are usually are from other bloggers in the same niche.
That sounds pretty typical Satrap. It looks like you have a pretty popular blog, the Alexa rake is great. I’ll be over there visiting shortly. 🙂
very nice points Brian Hawkins.cool pointing view.keep rocking 🙂
I run a niche website for the coffee industry and have been highly discouraged at the lack of commenting, but your post and a few other key factors have been making me feel better lately.
Luckily I have a friend with a coffee blog too and I have access to her Google Analytics information since I do a lot of her tech work for her.
Her blog gets twice the traffic and she gets a lot of comments (in my opinion for a niche coffee blog) but my pages-per-visit are higher, my time-on-site is nearly triple hers … and my bounce rate runs on average 8% less.
So thanks for the great post and helping a guy who also does “the marketing thing” feel better about the his blog’s lack of comments 🙂
My pleasure Chase, helping is what it’s all about. That’s an amazingly low bounce rate! Your stats show that there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to blogging success.
haha, well for the bounce rate I meant that mine runs 8% less than hers 🙂
You got this one pretty correct Brian. There are some niches that do well, but for the majority of true business blogs one probably isn’t going to get as many comments as other types of blogs. Of course, trying to figure that one out isn’t any easier.
I’m way behind on these relies Mitch but I wanted to mention a huge mistake I made with a local client about two years ago. I was getting decent traffic and comments on Extreme Ezine and when I built a niche blog for a local plastic manufacturing company, I had shown them my comments on a couple of my blogs. I couldn’t do anything to generate quality comments for their new blog. Their customers were large corporate auto manufacturers so customer interaction was impossible.
It was so embarrassing and I simply couldn’t deliver on that aspect. I could find very little online that related or even complimented their niche even for backlinks, much less generating blog comments. That was when I began to understand the dangers of “over selling” and the importance of explaining the other benefits that a company blog can provide. Live and learn I guess.
Well said… I haven’t seen anybody acknowledge that there may be arenas which just are not likely to generate much commenting. I have been to countless real estate site blogs and have rarely seen more than one or two comments.. the average really seems to be zero. Hopefully- the content still provides a valuable service and is informative to the site visitors.
I love being the first Kevin. lol
I am only to get entertained. Most of the time i’m looking for funny stuff to watch and to read.
Brian, I think I’d consider my blogs niche blogs. It is fairly new, working on content now.
I agree Steve but it looks like you are getting a good number of comments. There are all kinds of Government/Politics blogs and forums you can network/socialize with. It’s a small niche within a very large niche if that makes sense.
I played around with a niche blog with similar topics and, as you might already know, some of the political blogs can be brutal. Passions run strong when dealing with niches like politics, human rights and religion. That passion can be fantastic but can get pretty overwhelming too. Nice looking blog by the way. 🙂
thanks for this post mate, i agree, blog comments arent everything, we can diversify our backlinking techniques for sure.
That’s right Fazal, content and backlinks.
Thanks for sharing this useful post about blogging. I agree with the points raised on this article, niche blogging rarely do generate comments but it is still useful as there are some out there who needs these kind of blogs.
Thanks Japhet, useful indeed.
Getting good comment is what matters but when it comes to getting comment, you can get as many as you like but attracting the right kind of comment is very difficult especially when you are targeting a niche.
Thanks Brian for this awesome content.
It’s true Olawale, we’re always trying to discourage those, “nice blog post” comments and build some real conversation. I feel pretty fortunate in that regard with this blog. The admin seems to be slacking in his responsibilities though. 🙂 Sorry about taking so long to respond.
I don’t have any blog as yet, but this one is really interestig article. By seeing your example anyone can understand that niche blogs are difficult to maintain but you can do it if you’ve real passion about it.
Hi Aaron, Isn’t CarnivalGoa.com a blog? CommentLuv seems to think so.
Brian,
Niche blogs are definitely a completely different animal in need to be treated accordingly. On my main blog I am almost anal about trying to answer each and every post and letting posts go unless they are spammers.
Niche blogs are different. Of course there are some niches where comments and authority in that way may work for you. But most of them this isn’t the case. I find it best just to turn comments off on niche blogs, the time you spend trying to answer comments on these blogs also could be better spent creating fresh content.
But on an authority blog I still say that, is absolutely necessity unless you are already hugely established as a, “guru”. And even then I think it is an area where these high-traffic bloggers -should- still try to connect.
I try to keep up with replies Steve but, as you can see, I fall behind. 🙂
I have several niche/AdSense blogs with comments turned off. The only comments those blogs were generating were spam.
This is great advice. When making a niche site you have to have a different focus. In addition, the typical purpose of a niche site is to create a stream of income that is (relatively) passive meaning you don’t have to do much once it is up and running and your income still streams in. If you have to constantly respond to comments then it takes up too much of your time and energy. GReat advice
Thanks Scott, I want that income stream on all of my blogs but I totally understand what you are saying. Certain niche sites need only keyword research, great content and a lot of SEO. Well, before Panda that is; I’m still working with that one.
I too want to go for few niche blogs but i m not getting enough time for that. thanks for the post.
Time is tight for a lot of us Atish and I’ll be the first to admit that biting off more than we can chew hurts everything in the long run.
That’s correct Brian,
Blogs and bloggers in Internet marketing niche always receive more social interaction than other niches. Perhaps because of its natures as there are always new things to learn and new opinions to share. And because people in this money making niche are more familiar with “social tools” like Twitter, Facebook, CommentLuv, etc.
But that doesn’t mean that other niches don’t get much attention. They do but with my observation, less than IM niche. And they still do very well with it.
Yes they do Duy, or can if operated correctly. I love niche blogging.
Niche blog is really hard to maintain. I agree with you that in this particular blog focusing on blog comments is not the best approach. Instead, concentrate on your content and site traffic.
Not so hard once you get them started Jarrod, other than content and the SEO. I’ve been known to outsource the content a few times for niche blogs.
I have an aquarium related blog and I get very few comments per day. And most are question orientated without a link. So I disabled the link feature altogether. As for me commenting on other similar blogs, they are kinnda non-existent though a lot of forums exist…
That’s a great forum Cristian, I’m going to register. What’s your aquarium blog URL, it sounds like a pretty cool niche.
I agree with the others. You have to push out contents and be more concerned of the traffic as well.
Brian, I feel kind of used. Many readers come to be entertained and informed, then fail to comment. Perhaps these consumers just don’t get it. They probably don’t write a personal thank you note to each writer of newspaper stories they read. Or perhaps they are busy or uninterested in the kind of sweet DoFollow CommentLuv backlinks my site offers? I feel better now that I have had a chance to share my feelings.
I’m not sure but the keyword might be “consumers”. I notice you have a wide range of topics which is great but that can be pretty tough to drive targeted traffic, can’t it? I mean, if they’re clicking the ads and AdSense then I wouldn’t care about comments. I do see some pretty good comments though.
The only people that will care about CommentLuv and do-follow are other bloggers, which happen to be one of the toughest groups to sell to and will almost never click an ad. I guess it all depends on what your blogging objective is and going after the right market.
Prsonally, I find it hard to confine myself in niche blogging and for sure my readers thinks the same way. Bloggers also need a break and write something that he knows will interest his avid readers.
Hi Brian – I agree it can be very disheartening to spent time and energy making a great post if you then have little to no feedback, I find mixing it up with social / inside newsletters etc to get the word out about the new content and also, as simple as it sounds, mention that comments are most welcome, as sometimes folks maybe a little nervous to step forward to comment 🙂
I’m just getting started with a blog and I think you said it well that a blog needs quality & original content. I will try to make that my guidepost as I progress. Thank you, Brian!