Listen up kiddies, it’s learnin’ time! Yer ol’ pal Matt is about to drop some core blogging knowledge for newbie writers. Writing a blog is a rewarding process. However, even providing incredible content won’t mean much unless somebody’s actually reading it. “Link whoring”, AKA commenting on other, more established blogs, is one of the best ways to get on the blogging radar. There are two ways to link whore: The right way and the wrong way. Let’s examine both and learn how you can enrich the blogging environment, increase your SEO, grab new readers and avoid pissing off other bloggers at the very same time!

Before We Begin

Whoa there, chief! Before we get started on our link whoring journey, we’re going to need two things:

– A Blog
– Roughly 30-50 posts worth of good content

Depending on your blog’s content goals, you’ll either want a wide spectrum of topics or else a very narrow, detailed focus on one specific topic. I can’t stress the “good” part of “good content” hard enough. Thousands of lifestyle/fitness/dating/whatever blogs infest the internet. You need to stand out from the crowd by providing above-average writing or original insight, otherwise you’re just wasting your time by ripping off other writers.

Don’t Roll Like Kenny

I checked my spam filter the other day and noticed a comment from a guy named Kenny. Kenny is a great example of Doing It Wrong for several reasons. Check it out:

Oh my god, they killed Kenny’s comment!

What’s Kenny doing wrong? First off, his comment consists of five generic words and a link to his site. A limited amount of words plus a link basically ensures your comment will be trapped in spam limbo. I didn’t even see the comment for weeks and it’s still rotting among the corpses of the other “FrEE r3pl1Ca WatCHes” and “Cheap NFL Jersey” spam comments. I asked a couple of other bloggers, and many of them had similar comments from Kenny.

Click for a larger version

Comments like this don’t add any kind of value and leave me with the impression that the comment author didn’t even read the post. Needless to say, nobody I spoke to even bothered pulling Kenny’s comments out of the spam bin.

Doing It Right

So what’s the proper way to link whore? Start by leaving a thought-out, relevant comment or two before you even try to link back to your site. You’ll avoid getting trapped by the spam filter and the blog owner will hopefully realize you aren’t a total idiot. You can drop a relevant link or two in subsequent comments. If you have enough well-written blog content, you’ll be able to link to a wide variety of content. For example, I left this comment on my buddy Rob’s post about kitchen gear, which I later turned into the world’s best paleo recipe. Now I can drop a link on food blogs and share my incredible, barely edible cooking insight with the world.

Pretty straightforward stuff, so go forth and spread that comment love far and wide! Try not to get anybody pregnant while you’re at it.

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