Hey Bloggers, Scratch Our Blog and We’ll Scratch Yours

I was reading an article the other day explaining different ways to get people to leave comments on your blog and one technique that stood out to me was fairly simple (my favorite kind). He said that you should spend a little bit of time each day visiting blogs in your niche and to leave relevant helpful comments on blog posts that interest you. The more helpful you are the better chance you have of raising your profile, which hopefully will drive more traffic to your blog. That totally makes sense.

Well that got me thinking. How can we get people to leave comments on our site even faster? What can we do in exchange for them leaving a comment(s)? I know there are thousands of new blogs started each week and I am sure most of them would love to get comments. One thing I have noticed is… if you take the time and post comments on smaller blogs that don’t get a lot of activity (ones with fewer comments on them), that often the owner of that blog will checkout your blog to see what you have going. Many times he will leave a comment on your blog as gratitude for your comments. This can happen with the Big Boy blogger sites as well, but probably not as often.

So the next thing that popped in my head was a “comment exchange” program, so I did a quick search on Google and saw that there were some that already existed. We looked at a few of them and read different reviews, but we were not too impressed with any of the ones we saw. So we decided not to join any of them.

What we did decide to do is try our own non-formal comment exchange program. Here is how it works… If you leave at least one “helpful and relevant” comment on one of our blog posts (just writing “Great Post!” does not count), Mark and I will do our best to checkout your blog and return the favor with a comment as well. Sound good?

Now we are not guaranteeing anything, as we do not know who will be commenting on our site. But if you have a good blog started with some interesting content, we will definitely do our best to leave you a comment.

Now this is just a test, so we have to have a cutoff date just in case it doesn’t work or if it works too well and we get overwhelmed with comments. So let’s make the cutoff date July 15, 2009 and evaluate how it worked, and then decide if we should extend it.

Here is one more suggestion that will hopefully benefit any of you who decide to participate in our comment exchange. Why not visit the sites of the people commenting on our blog and leave a comment on their site as well? There is a chance that they are participating in this test too and they might leave you a comment back on yours as well. You have nothing to lose and you definitely will get more exposure.

UPDATE JULY 20, 2009 – We just wanted to thank everyone that has been leaving comments on our site and we have tried  to return the favor to each of you. In doing so we have found lots of great sites that we never knew exisited. Since this is working so well, we will continue to visit anyone’s site who leaves a comment on our site. We will also try and return the favor on your site and hopefully we can build lots of longterm friendships in the process.