I know what you mean. There's so many people offering spammy blasts, dirt-cheap services, etc. It's easy to get lost in the mix.

As far as what you'd charge, are you going to find the blogs in addition to leaving comments? Or are you planning on just leaving comments @ blogs designated by your client?

I was going to find the blogs myself. These would be real blogs, not ones that auto approve comments. These would have to go through a filtering process by the owner. That is the reason why I would not make them spammy and would only include a website link owned by the client.

Does your service stand out? - Good, then your price tag should too!

Don't be too discouraged by competitors who charge less for their work that you want to charge for yours. All things have their own qualities, even when they're similar.


Do you buy your shoes from Walmart or a speciality shop?

Do you get your reading material from the local book store or download it in kindle format?

Do you drive a Cadillac or a Hyundai?


All of those options offer the same thing - but in different ways. And best of all, they're all still in business.


Just make sure your prospective clients know WHY you're charging what you are. (Because you're offering real value, not spam - or whatever your strongest value prop. will be)

Cheers,
-Adrian

I appreciate the good words. I needed to hear them.

In a word - Nothing.

Akismet filters out tons of crap from my blog every month. I wouldn't do this to someone else's blog since I hate blog spam so much. And that is what a blog commenting service is doing.

Not the kind of comments I would leave. I would have guidelines, because I would want the comments to actually add something to the blog.

Such a service *could* be valuable, but problem is, your customers would be trusting their reputation to you. A "high quality blog comment", at least for me means...

(1) I've read the blog post in the first place,
(2) I'm commenting on the post in a way that not only reflects that I've read the article, but is also "adding to the conversation"...much like this reply to you

Can I trust that someone else will do this, and at the same time, comment in a way that harmonizes with my own opinions, beliefs etc?

Again, this isn't trying to prevent you from offering such a service. Quite the opposite. I'm just showing you the kind of hurdles you would have to overcome.

Not worth anything to me. I make it nearly impossible for people to comment. Opening my blogs up to comments just gets tons of spammers and fake comments are just fake comments whether they're "high quality" or not.

Perhaps the best way to overcome the concern about crap comments would be .... to let the person paying for the service to write the comments themselves.

The comments will then overcome all of those objections - however it will also (no doubt) seem less authentic.

Perhaps a hybrid approach - where you allow them to tell you what they want said, but you word it as you please?

Just some thoughts.

Cheers,
-Adrian

In my opinion, I think its OK to offer manual blog commenting service instead of auto blog comment blast service. However, You need to make something stands out among other competitor. For example, on my Fiverr VA service, I have advantage among all VA gig on Fiverr because I will record down my work. My customers stated that is the factor that makes them buy my gig.

As for your blog commenting service, you make it unique by stating that you will carefully read the whole blog post before leave a comment, and customers will only have to pay for comment that is approved within a time limit. You can also make a report for your customer showing them which blog you have commented on, and which one has already approved.

The ideas are limitless, think out of the box to figure out some creative ideas.

Greetings everyone,

Robin, I am very surprised by the lukewarm to negative reaction to your idea. I think it's GREAT.

I 'get' exactly where you are coming from and what you would be offering. What's not to 'get'?

Sure the advice about 'differentiating' yourself from the cheap services as much as possible is ... um ... good advice. If you are marketing a service it is always good to make it as unique as possible. Can't argue with that.

However, you don't have to actually do anything more than what you've already done!

I've been looking for something like what you are thinking about offering for some time now. I've tried some services and individuals but they haven't met my standards.

I don't know if your work would be of the quality that I seek - or at a price point that would work for me - but what you are thinking about offering is EXACTLY what I have been looking for, for some time now.

I can tell you and anyone reading this that finding someone or a service to do this at a premium but reasonable price point is EXTREMELY difficult.

As I said, from my perspective, you don't really have to do anything beyond what you've already done to 'differentiate' yourself from your competition.

In fact, if I were you, I wouldn't even mention the 10,000 auto-approved blog comments for $10 type of 'competition' in your marketing. If someone actually thinks that is a viable alternative to what you are offering they don't have a low seo iq - they have a NEGATIVE one. Don't waste your time trying to educate them.

To use an analogy, there isn't a single 4 star restaurant in this country that feels a 'need' to justify why their prices are astronomically higher than McDonalds! :-) In fact, to do so, would seem downright bizarre and cheapen their image. For whatever it's worth, I would suggest that you take a similar approach in your own marketing.

You don't have to do anything more to convince me that you're worth trying. In fact, I'll be sending you a private message when I'm finished writing this.

I don't have much of an idea as to how large your potential market is, all I know is that if the quality is there and we can agree on a price, I'll give you a constant stream of work. It would seem to me that there would have to be other people in our community who see things the way that I do ... but then again, I tend to march to my own drummer.



I thought that Alexa Smith's post was very thoughtful.

"Ultimately, it's not something I'd easily trust someone to do on my behalf.

To people who care about getting comments on relevant blogs, blog-commenting is a relationship-building process. Today's blog comment is tomorrow's guest blogging and next week's article syndication.

My purpose in doing blog comments is to build relationships and to try to attract someone's traffic to my site (ok, the backlink doesn't necessarily hurt either, if the site's really relevant enough to mine). I have no aversion in principle to outsourcing this, but I think it's going to be terribly hard - and maybe impossible - for me to find someone who really understands my business well enough to be able to represent me in such a fundamental, personal and essential way?"

It's SPOT ON ... but not really a blog commenting STRATEGY imo. The blog commenting that she describes is just one part of an infinitely more ambitious relationship building strategy that is only likely to take place over a signficant period of time.

I want to make it clear that I'm not putting the strategy down. Leaving a series of thoughtful comments over time on someone's blog WILL get you noticed and make it exponentially more likely that you might be able to establish a relationship with that blog owner than if you contacted them cold.

If you can pull if off the world is your oyster! :-) However, it requires time, quite a bit of work - and not just work but different kinds of expertise.

IMO, many niches don't lend themselves to this approach and I don't think that the average webmaster would be all that skilled at doing this.

I think that it would be extremely difficult to find someone to represent you in "such a fundamental, personal and essential way" but POSSIBLE. However, using some kind of service would be out of the question. The only way that you could do it would be if you worked closely with a very talented VA or writer - and paid them accordingly.

Alexa goes on to say: "many of the people who are comfortable about outsourcing this are people who are looking at it "for the backlinks", and they're the ones who are not really willing to pay anything much, because they don't care much about quality"

You busted me Alexa - at least the part about being in it for the backlinks! LOL

However, what's so bad about that? :-)

Alexa makes two erroneous assumptions imo. She assumes that everyone's seo strategy is basically the same and that is obviously not the case from my perspective.

Anyone who doesn't engage in spammy seo by definition has a 'different seo strategy' than the people who drool over opportunities to get 50,000 profile links for $5! :-)

Furthermore, while fabulous guest posts on popular blogs are certainly done in part for the traffic, they are ALSO done for the seo benefits - which means that many of the brightest thinkers on the web - who understand a little bit about seo - are writing AMAZING guest posts ... "for the backlinks".

They should be ashamed of themselves! LOL

Secondly, she's wrong about there not being anyone willing to pay premium prices for quality comments because I am such a person. She may be right about everyone else but she's wrong about me.
And who knows, there might even be other people like me! LOL

Paul Hancox wrote: "your customers would be trusting their reputation to you." I think that really nails what spooks a lot
of people about this kind of outsourcing. It is certainly something that bothered me for quite some time.

However, a client has two choices regarding authorship when utilizing this kind of service. The freelance writer can write in the client's name or a fictional one.

I am not interested in the former.

However, what's so bad about using a pseudonym? If someone posts a relevant thoughtful comment on some blog as 'Tom' and Tom is the link to my site - as opposed to a keyword being the 'name' - what's so terrible about that?

While I would not be happy if the comment was unthoughtful and horribly written - at the end of the day, it really doesn't reflect upon me personally or my site.

The fact of the matter is that there is nothing stopping anyone from doing exacly that right now - to either you or myself. If I wanted to, I could write a comment with a 100 misspellings and grammatical errors and link to Microsoft with the anchor text "Tom". There is nothing illegal about that. However, would that have any impact on your opinion about Bill Gates if you read my comment?

So, one key decision is whether the comment will be written in the client's name or a pseudonym. I am not comfortable with the first but I am with the second.

Another key decision is whether to use a keyword as anchor text or just use a regular name. I think the later is the way to go - it will make it look exponentially less like you're doing it for seo reasons - and you still get a link.

Another decision is whether the blog needs to be in the same niche as the site that you are promoting. Common sense says yes, and you certainly can't go wrong doing that, but my tests indicate that comments on really big sites - even if they are not related to the topic of your website - are effective. What's so bad about commenting about a general interest news story?

Furthermore, which of these do you think looks more natural to Google?

1) 100% of your comments are on blogs within your niche.

2) Most of your comments are within your niche but not exclusively so.

While the above is a bit of a judgment call that could go either way (I would lean toward #2) there is a similar question that is not ambiguous at all imo.

And it's a mistake that 99+% of all people doing seo commenting make.

100% of their comments are of the do-follow variety.

HOW NATURAL DO YOU THINK THIS APPEARS TO GOOGLE?

I can tell you - COMPLETELY UNNATURAL.

I guarantee that if you are doing seo commenting - it WILL be exponentially more effective if you act dumb ... act like you don't understand seo ... and make some no-follow comments. :-)

Not only does it make your commenting look more natural, they actually COUNT - despite what you've been told. If you doubt me on this, there is a very easy way to test this for yourself.

Choose a page on your site that has a keyword that you want to rank for. Don't do any seo for it - except for 1 - 3 no-follow comments four or more times a week. Don't use your keyword, just use a normal name as the anchor text.

According to seo 'experts', this has NO chance of working because you are not using the keyword in the anchor text and the links are no-follow. They'll tell you that you're a REAL IDIOT! LOL

If your keyword is in the page title and used a few times in the content on the page, and you have 400+ words of content, your rankings for that keyword WILL rise over time - at least that has been my experience 98% of the time.

Just my two centavos.

In any case Robin, I think that things such as the specific niche, niche vs non-niche, and do-follow vs no-follow are key factors that you need to consider when pricing your services.

For whatever it's worth, this is how I see things but I certainly don't think that my perspective is any more valid than anyone else's.

I hope that this was useful or provoked a thought or two in a couple of people.

Cheers,

NotValidInNewJersey

"Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it"

Lilly Tomlin

My advice is to become as well-acquainted as possible with your client's website and/or blog BEFORE you start writing comments for them. Spend more time getting to know them and you will find it easier to speak for them in the comments you write.

Ultimately, the best way to avoid saying something that your client doesn't like is to simply send the comments to them before you post, in order to confirm their approval beforehand. That way no one gets upset later and you can avoid losing clients since they know what is being said before you say it.

Hope these ideas help.

I am actually going to try and market this offline. It is a big step, but I believe I can get more going this route. I am still trying to sort things out.

Blog commenting alone will not drive traffic to any site but leaving high quality comments on a blog shows that you are interested in the discussion and it can help build your reputation as an authority.