I’ve been playing with a neat little (free) tool the last couple of days. It alerts you *immediately* when you favorite bloggers post something new.
This isn’t an RSS feed reader, but rather a way for you to hightail it to the blog in question and add a comment. It’s faster then RSS – you can set it to poll the blogs you enter as often as you’d like.
On high traffic blogs, being the first commentor will drive considerable clicks and traffic to your own site – imagine being the first to respond to a Techcrunch article, John Reese Income.com update or Darren Rowse post – thousands of people will see your response.
Of course, it’s imperative (if you want people to actually visit your site) to leave informative, insightful comments. Just writing, “Great post!” won’t entice as many click-throughs.
If there are notable blogs in your industry you’d like to grab a piece of the traffic action from, Comment Sniper is an awesome way to do it.
Hat tip to Jack for the tip!
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Wow, cool application, not that expensive either considering.
Personally I use google alerts quite a lot to do tracking. The big downfall is that you dont get notification immediately like with Comment Sniper.
I think if Duncan knew how we’d be using this and the value of this thing he might think twice about giving it away again!
It is really getting me some good traffic just from the way it was intended to be used.
But then…there’s this other way to use it that REALLY kicks butt…
Whoops, phone’s ringing, gotta go.
just be careful with this type of strategy. Like you say comments need to be worthwhile. Also if you are first to comment on every post bloggers and their readers can become annoyed and frustrated. I’d suggest picking the post you want to comment on carefully and use some restraint.
LOL, yeah – being the first commentor on EVERY post at someone’s blog is definately not the best strategy!
Again, add value, and if you don’t have anything interesting to say this time, wait for the next post to roll out and see if it’s a better fit.
This is an awesome tool! thank you for suggesting it.
Back tracking your posts… another great hit for me. Gonna try it and post back if it results in more traffic.
it’s an interesting concept, and I’ll definitely try it out, but also for the fact the you can read the posts as they come out and keep up to date on the latest buzz.
thx for letting known about this tool!
Y’know how revelational it was when someone first said the 2nd or 3rd ads on Google Adwords got HIGHER clicks than the top one?
Well, I’ve found being a ‘later’ blog commenter brings in more clicks and traffic.
For instance, #7 comments get 7 times more
(tongue firmly in cheek!)
Nice post, and tool
All success
Dr.Mani
Thanks Michelle, it’s true, being the first to comment on popular Blog can drive great traffic to your site. We just have to be careful on not look spammy and contribute to the community.
Thanks for another great tip. I love your blog and I love your style. You are an inspiration to me.
Hi
I have been using comment Kahuna, comment hut on and off for a while now and also the Groovytastic version
which although it returns quite unique blogs to post to it is not as easy as the previous two apps.
I have just down loaded this tool to give it a go and compare it against the others. I will let you know Michelle but in the mean time if you have used the others maybe you can let me in on how you feel they stack up
nellygb
Thanks Michelle.
Already been using this and I can confirm, it’s a nifty little tool that is in a way competition for one of our tools (name witheld of course).
Side note to Jack: That’s naughty of you teasing like that
Stewart
This seems quite like comment kahuna (jason potash) which was also free at the time.
I think it’s great for finding new “leads”, but like all things web 2, I think it is better to be organic and form a relationship. AKA determine who’s blog and their audience is important to you and check them out everyday anyway.
What happens with these sort of tools is what happens on my blog. Probably yours too
I get hundreds of (attempted) spam comments about irrelevant things, from people I don;t know, who only come once, just because I have a keyword match. But you can say umbrella for several reasons
I’m starting to feel like a ludite, but anything that is automated and is supposed to make things quicker, either doesn’t work, or doesn’t work as God intended.
Every day it seems to prove to me that old fashioned leg work rules. You also get to develop a “feel” that no automated or time saving labour device can.
I mean sliced bread is OK, but it is nothing like bakers baked bread.
And the metaphor follows thru. It is more expensive, it takes longer to go to the shop to buy an you can;t eat as much, but it is better.
Ask yourself do you want to buy the tiger toasties of blog comments, or the Nightingle King Bloomer?
Either way I prefer rolls, so my list of blogging sites is even more personal and erm. tasty…
Peter
Well downloaded it and set it up and opened it and without trying ….Ive used up my trial credits so have to purchase the blah blah b***dy blah. Come on Michelle have you stooped to this level to make a few quid.
This is not free and will never be free so why did you feel you needed to waste my time and effort by claiming it was.
More hype
nellygb
Well blog traffic is great but Michelle does the blog traffic equal increased sales and / or revenues?
We must to move beyond the knee-jerk reaction to automation assuming it is going to be used as a spam tool before anything else.
It’s like we expect the worst just because people will use anything to spam if possible.
Those people aren’t us, yet we all spend an inordinate amount of time and energy admonishing spammers and even worrying about ourselves being spammy.
Any software that does things like this can be used for spam. And people will use it for spam.
But nothing has changed AT ALL. This particular software doesn’t add any significant spam to the load we are already getting every day and have to moderate anyway.
You as a blogger will not have to moderate any more than you do now because of this software.
Unless, people are using it to supply your site with user generated content that IS good enough to post but WAS generated because they used this software.
Where’s the harm in that?
If we start assuming the best and stop worrying about what spammers are doing we’ll spend a lot less time on discussions that aren’t going to change anything in the end anyway.
I assume everyone here will use this and any other software properly. Innocent until PROVEN guilty.
If we all take a stab at the positive we can seea big decline in the amount of lip service we feel we must give on anything new that comes out as it pertains to how people are going to use it to spam.
Hell, let’s stop giving spammers ideas if nothing else!
Looks like a good tool if used wisely. The key is to post good relevant content.
It should be noted that this tool is not friendly to Vista machines.
This does seem like it could help to bring a little more traffic.
I would love to see a thorough report after testing it out a bit. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl or if you can beat me to it
I tested this already weeks ago and found it to be more and more annoying after a while – you aren’t in the mood to comment all day on blogs. But it keeps alerting and distracting you all the time. As with any toy: you may find it attractive for a short while and then get rid of it. Sorry.
What IF everyone have this tool…
wouldn’t they all be fighting to be first??
Just wondering.
Thanks for the heads up Michelle
Thanks for the tool Michelle. That last post by Peter was hilarious too.
Spammy comments will always be a problem, will this tool add more spammy comments? Probably. But it will also allow relevant posters the opportuntiy to post relevant comments quick and get google juice, which is always a good thing.
Nothing is perfect, and the benefits of this tool outweigh the negatives. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks Michelle, I did try Duncans link managment software but I had some problems with it. Going to try this = and post back if I get results.
It might have had some help to create comments or is that too Cheeky?? David
@Nellygb – it’s free. You have to enter a license code, you get the license code in your email. Chillax and read the directions.
1. The point is not to be first.
The point is to be relevant in your market. If you are not engaged in the discussion going on in your niche, how relevant can you be? Being higher in the comments than #145 is better.
2. The results have been more traffic from blogs I’ve used it on. Period. More traffic.
3. It’s not a tool that’s for sale, it’s neither Michelle’s nor my tool, and we are not the kind of people to throw up something junky since we both rely on our reputation for repeat visits.
Its kind of hard to fight with people for their own successful marketing campaigns. Seems kind of out of balance that you’d have to PUSH people to look at tools that might get them more traffic if they use them.
Seems like they’d want to and we wouldn’t have to rescue them from their own paranoia and angst against their own success.
well thanks Michelle… for driving my attention to this tool… definitely it sounds promising…
I agree with Jack Humphrey, relevancy is the real attraction getter for click throughs. A great marketing tip is that most sales are not made by logic, they’re made by emotions. They are the real “driver” for sales. If you can spark an emotion to the person reading, they will probably click the link. But still, this new tool mentioned by Michelle is extremely valuable if combined with this tip.
To respond to Peter:
I’ve been using CommentSniper for a while, and I don’t use it to spam. In fact, it helps me build relationships with bloggers in my niche. After all, there are only so many blogs I can visit in a day to see IF MAYBE they’ve posted something of interest. With comment sniper, the alerts come instantly, so if I’m wasting time anyway I can head directly there and be first poster.
Otherwise, I can look through the notification list for titles that interest me. Perhaps if you think of it as just a different sort of feed reader, you’ll like it a bit more.
Wendy
I’ve been using Comment Hut for a while now and it works well. I’ll try this tool too. What I do is when I comment is write a thoughtful post and offer some off-site resource such as an article or blog post on topic to the post. Normally this will be related to something I’m working on for a client. I’ve actually received numerous e-mails thanking me for the contributions I’ve made. I never leave a comment if I can’t contribute something worthy.
Michelle, thanks for the great info and wonderful tool. I can see where have the first comment on a popular blog post could be helpful. Are there any statistics on how the click rate falls off as you move down the list. I will be honest, I never really read all the comments myself, but maybe some people do. Thanks again.
James
Very cool,thanks! One thing I am confused about from reading the tutorial though
“Input the Title Tag. This is the most important part. You must tell the Comment Sniper how to find the blog post “title” tags in the XML feed. This depends on the XML structure. For example the Title tag for Blogger XML feeds is feed/entry/title and for the Wordpress XML feed it is rss/channel/item/title. This might differ for other blog platforms so you will have to double check. ”
How do I double check this?I am not sure how to know what my title tag is for my rss?
Thanks again.
Justin,
Just using the default seems to work for most blogs.
That tool would be extremely wonderful and useful… if it still existed. Any suggestions for alternatives?
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