Today I read this article on Nongeek perspective: Things To Keep In Mind When Promoting Your Blog Through Comments – Nongeek perspective. As you might have guessed, it’s about using comments to get links to your blog.

This might seem like a good idea. If you’re a super commenter you can get your link into very many blogs with a day’s worth of work, right?

Unfortunately there are a few reasons for why these links aren’t worth much:

• They get ignored. Because of our contemporary ad clutter, surfers have become really good at ignoring everything but the main content of a web page. They came for the content and that’s what they’ll read if they have a choice. Meanwhile your comments are at the very bottom of the page, sometimes even requiring a click to get to! Sure, some people are curious about the comments and will read them but out of those people only even fewer actually click on names of random people unless your comment really blew them away.
• The links have the wrong context. Usually the link to your blog is described by your name. So if the visitor clicks on your name they get to your blog. This is what the search engines look at. What text surrounds the link? What might the linked to page be about? So those links are not very useful for your search engine rankings. Only people who actually search for you by name find your page – and unless you’re rather famous the number of people who search for you by name might be quite small!
• Your time is money. In order to make a good mind blowing please-click-the-author comment you need to at least read the actual article. Then it’ll take you another couple of minutes to write a thoughtful comment. So you spend maybe 30 minutes on each comment. Even if your day job pay is lousy, that’s at least $3.25 of income you just lost. Now do that for a 100 links and you just lost $325. You can buy Text Link Ads for less than that and still get more exposure with better context. (Full Disclosure: the link is Playing With Wire’s affiliate link to Text Link Ads.)

Rather than going out to comment for the sake of exposure I suggest reading articles you actually want to read, and comment for the sake of saying something you want to say. Save your marketing energy for bigger things and you’ll be happier, while the money you save can get you more exposure at the same time.