If you are like me, you enjoy blogging. Even though I have not been doing it for very long, I find it enjoyable writing early in the mornings while drinking coffee.

Even more enjoyable, is interacting with my readers through the comments that they leave for me to publish. This is a great opportunity for me to understand who my visitors are and what they are interested in as well as what they think.

Commenting on blogs, however, has actually now become a marketing tool widely used by many. Today’s post is about how to do this effectively.

When I first began efforts to promote websites, I tried every avenue to promote them (we will discuss more of these later). Key to promoting websites is obtaining text links pointing back to your site. The search engines love these because they are the equivalent of a human casting a vote in terms of your websites relevancy. Therefore, many links means many votes. Correct? Not exactly.

Search engine algorithms are increasingly effective and for the most part can tell a spam link from a real one. But how is this possible? Computers cannot make judgment calls like that! Well, we must remember, these formulas are tweaked by humans who constantly test the accuracy of the results.

So, how does blog commenting work?

To answer that question, let’s begin by showing how it doesn’t work. Let’s imagine for a moment that you are browsing Google’s blog search and find loads of blogs on the subject of Internet Marketing. You click on one and immediately search for the comment box. You next, cut and paste your standard comment from your “blog commenting” notepad document to all of the relevant fields and submit. You might also do this using software. Whatever the case, this type of comment is quickly recognized as an unpublishable comment and the author and search engines can tell the difference. This, my friends, is SPAM.

So, how does one “blog comment” correctly as a marketing and also a networking tool?

Imagine again that you are in Google’s blog search and find a swarm of blogs on the subject of Internet Marketing because that is what you are interested in. You click on one and open it up. You actually read it’s contents because they interest you. You learn something. Out of appreciation for the informative information, you decide to leave a well thought out comment that actually adds to the discussion. DO NOT include a link to your site in your comment.

Most blogs these days have a field that asks for your URL. When the blog moderator reads your comment. If he/she likes it, they approve it. If they really like it, they visit your URL. If they really like your URL, they may link to a page in it either through a text link in one of their posts or somewhere else on their site. THOSE are the links that search engines want to see and they can tell the difference.

I must admit, I am guilty of the former and it doesn’t work. Of course, SPAM never does. What it does do is annoy people.

So what is the point of this? Blog commenting is very effective if done correctly. It is a great way to network and get quality back-links as well as get noticed by bloggers.