The Power of a Comment

Written on February 11th, 2009 at 01:02 pm by Darren Rowse

In this post Lisa Newton from Travelin’ Local shares the story of how leaving a comment on a blog increased traffic back to her blog 975% in a day.

It’s a well-known fact that commenting on other people’s blogs helps drive traffic to your own blog. I knew this, but until today, I had never seen its real results. Harnessing the action ability has led individual blog owners to comment back, which happened to me several times, like here, here, and here.

But, this time it was different:

To begin with I received a new digital camera for Christmas.

Now not knowing too much about digital photography, I went searching the experts over the Internet.

One of the first places I landed was at the Digital Photography School.
I immediately fell in love with the site and instantly subscribed to their RSS feed.

Low and behold, the other day, just as I was browsing my Google Reader, a new post from DPS popped up, What is Your Favorite Landscape Location?.
I just had to comment, and like most California girls, my favorite place to shoot pictures is at the beach.

Now, I know I’d hit it lucky because my comment was only the second one on the list. The prevailing theory is that the closer your comment is to being first, the more hits it will get.

Because my blog is only a month old, I usually don’t get much traffic, on average about 15 -20 hits per day. But on the day I made the comment, I got 195 hits, an increase of over 975%, with almost all of it coming via the Digital
Photography School. Recently Darren over at Problogger reported getting his single largest day of hits on DPS to the tune of 250,000 hits. Although 195 isn’t even close to 250,000, but I’ll bet the increased percentage on Travelin’ Local was higher.

All from that one comment.

On another bright spot, dgwphotography left the following comment on this blog post’s featured photo at Flickr:

“This is beautiful - I saw this from your reply on the Digital Photography School blog.

I love the deep depth of field here…”

The power of comments is truly inspirational; when translated into action.

Do you leave valuable comments? Have you ever had a comment experience like this?