I’m sure you have been told that in order to be a successful blogger, you need to be active in your communities. What this means is that you should be commenting on other blogs, communicating with other players in your niche, participating in topic related forums, and doing anything else that will expose your personality to new readers.

Before I started writing on this blog, I was subscribed to about 10-15 different “internet business” blogs. Since then, I have found a ton of other blogs (currently subscribed to 42) that I wouldn’t have found otherwise, and have been using them to gain a little bit of exposure for myself.

The coolest thing about participating in your niche and commenting on related blogs and forums is that, if done correctly, it benefits everyone involved. Authors love to receive comments on their work, the commentators get exposure, and the readers (if they are interested in the comments) either benefit from the additional insights or from the chance to discuss.

One the flip side, if done incorrectly, it benefits no one. Authors have to moderate and remove spam, commentators waste their time and gain a bad reputation (although most may not care), and readers have to sort through the useless junk.

When commenting on other blogs, I take the approach of getting noticed by one reader at a time. If leaving a comment on a blog results in just one new visitor, it was well worth it. Really, how long does it take you to come up with a comment? You are probably reading the post anyways whether you comment or not.

I started leaving comments from day one, and now, one week later, I am seeing 50-100 uniques a day being sent to DerekBeau.com from those comments alone.

Although that small traffic bonus is nice, it is not the biggest reason to leave comments. The best reason to leave comments is so that the authors take notice of you and your blog. Hopefully you are building relationships with people that you leave comments for as well as with people that leave comments for you. Doing so can lead to getting mentioned on their blog, which is far more beneficial than having a little link in their comment sections.

The cumulative effect of actively participating in your niche is that as more people notice you, you begin to build more relationships, which leads to more “favorable mentions,” which leads to even more people noticing you, and even more people mentioning your work, and so on and so on. Over time, it becomes an obvious exponential effect.

In closing, I would like to thank Hock of Marketing Tools Review Blog for the great review of DerekBeau.com as well as Linda of 5 Star Affiliate Programs for sharing my testing and tracking article with her forum.