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Many people frown upon blog commenting as a means for marketing websites and blogs. They term it as spam Period! No explanation will make them think of this as a healthy and legitimate method of spreading a word about your sites.

But you can’t blame them for this attitude of scorn towards blog commenting. There are hordes of blatant comments on blog posts on the web hoping to get some PR juice. In keeping in mind the PR juice they forget the more important entity in the scenario, the blog reader and the blog owner. A random comment on a highly informative blog post ends up demeaning the brand of the website or blog it is promoting. Neither will the blog owner or the readers will ever endorse your site.

Instead of this unrestrained deluge of commenting why not find interesting, related topics and add value to it. A good comment which adds two cents to the ongoing discussion will surely draw more targeted traffic and give the website a chance at word of mouth marketing too. Again its, no rocket science, it just needs some observant reading, some patience and little more time.

Think of blog commenting as distributing pamphlets in a neighborhood or colony. Would you want your pamphlet to be simple crumbled and crushed by the receiver and thrown away? Would you want the receiver to have a look at it and then forget it immediately?
I am sure you would want to be perceived as somebody unique and who registers in the customer’s memory.

Blog commenting, my dear friend is no different! Take it little more seriously and you would not only make a strong impact about yourself but also end up making web a better place.

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Its not only about the moolah, eyeballs, hits, PPC and revenue. That’s the beauty of the web. Why do marketing campaigns have to be selling you something?And why do not for profit campaigns have to be not so beautiful, effective and well carved out?

Ok, before you think I am promoting something, check out http://jaagore.com

One of the best campaigns i can think of in the recent past in the niche of social messaging. The idea and the implementation both are equally appealing.

Love to see the use of web for such purpose.

Also this is one of the rare campaigns in the Indian circuit which seamlessly blend a public service message with the commercial aspect of a product.

And lastly this is different in the aspect that their core platform is the web and they are using traditional medial to bring people to web and not vice-versa, which generally is the case.

Well done Tata! (The Industrial house behind this campaign)

And of course let’s vote.

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Are you one of those who sweat it out for your website’s layout, content and marketing but take it easy when it comes to selecting a hosting service for your online venture?
If your answer is a Yes or a near Yes, I would suggest that keep hosting service selection as an important task in your scheme of things.

While there are more than one reason for making a well researched choice before selecting a service provider, none is more important than the fact that its not often that you switch hosts and even if you do, it can be a cumbersome process.
What kind of services you should be looking for depends upon your website and your requirements, but few selection criteria are almost universal, like:

• i) Uptime - This is generally expressed in % and signifies the quality of service in terms of being available or down for maintenance/upgrades. If you are serious about your online presence and have a good traffic, then anything less than 99% is a strict no. Its like customers coming to a store and finding it closed often. It will turn off the visitor and he or she may move on permanently from your website. Moreover Google search bots also don’t like a site to be down when they come to crawl your page.
• ii) Features- There are some standard features which you would want to have like a cpanel which allows you to easily manage your hosting account. Also, look out for sub-domains, email accounts and scripts which assist you in installing wordpress or other open source package.
• iii) Page load speed - Your pages should load quickly. You don’t want your visitors to feel frustrated waiting for things to load. A service provider with a good server which can handle loads at peak time will not let you down on this.
• iv) Customer Service- Check out for the hosting company’s turnaround time when it comes to addressing customer queries and providing technical support. A word of mouth testimonial from people who have tried the service can be beneficial in making a decision.

There are many more factors but these form the crux. So in nut shell go with only the best web hosting with cpanel, which can handle load at peak time and provides a quality customer service.

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I have read thousands of times at thousand different places that commenting on other blogs helps increase traffic on your blog. Well I never doubted that wisdom. What I did not know was that it helps in getting good quality traffic. Although it should be a natural extension of the argument.

But recently while checking out the stats for my blog, one thing was very peculiar which caught my eye. Here is the screen shot of the same.

I know!, I know! stats are not too great. But that is not the point of the post. The striking thing, if you would have noticed , is the 4th column. Yes! Average time spent on site which says that referrals from Problogger and Twitter spend unusual high time as compared to other referral sites.

Now this observation has few implications. The list goes like this-

1) Commenting on good blogs not only brings traffic but Quality traffic to your blog. It is quite often that we forget the quality part.

2) Look out for such blogs like Problogger in your niche and start leaving sensible comments.

3) Microblogging platforms like Twitter goes a long way in building up good reputation for your blog or online presence.

4) Don’t leave out on content aggregators like MyBlogLog or Friendfeed since they will assume more importance in future.

If there is anything which I may have missed out, please feel free to share it with me.

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We had a pleasant surprise couple of days back when Google Gods bestowed our home page with a PR3!

Its not that we lost on sleep when we missed a PR change during the first page rank update this year (we were 1 month old then), but were certainly looking forward to a promotion. Most of our back links done by us were genuine and organic comments on blogs talking on the related subjects (apart from the initial basic directory submission).

But we still maintain the stand that one should, for some time to come do honor the Page Rank but never toil hard keeping it as a target, instead focus on useful content for readers , ideas and knowledge and PR will be a pleasant by-product then.

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