Quick Case Study: Finding Good Blogs To Comment On
Posted on August 26, 2007 by
Adie 
Blogging, Internet Marketing 
6 Comments
17 days ago, I wrote about a blogging exercise to find gardening blogs worth commenting on. I chose the gardening niche, because I know nothing about gardening and I wanted to challenge my niche research skills. Well, I finally did the exercise myself. Here’s how it went.
8:50pm
I started by Googling garden blog. I went to the 2nd webpage on the search engine results page (SERP). It was blog, but it didn’t allow comments. I went back to the SERP and visited the 1st webpage, a garden blog directory. The directory had a lot of gardening blogs listed, but no real way to determine the popular blogs. However, as I was scrolling through the directory, I noticed a Feedburner FeedCount chicklet. The directory was part of a gardening blog with over 400 RSS subscribers!
I went to the homepage, ColdClimateGardening.com. It was definitely a good blog to comment on. The blogger posted regularly and usually got more than 10 comments per post.
9:00pm
I looked back at the SERP. The 3rd webpage was another good gardening blog, Tangled Branches Blog. It had comments on most posts, though not as many as the first blog. Also, the blogger posted regularly with 10 posts in August already.
9:10pm
I went back to the SERP and visited the 4th webpage, a gardening blog based in Alaska. It didn’t have a lot of comments, probably because you had to register to comment. However, the bloggers there posted almost daily. And the domain had an Alexa rank of less than 30,000.
9:15pm
I hit the back button and examined the SERP again. The 5th webpage was a video game site and the 6th webpage was a gardening blog that wasn’t updated regularly.
I tried Mahalo, a directory/search engine. When I typed gardening blog, it gave me the option of searching for gardening blogs and forums. I tried that option, but it just gave me a list of gardening forums. I went back and searched for gardening blog, but it gave me google search results. Back to square one.
9:20pm
I finished looking through the rest of the SERP. The 7th webpage was a huge list of gardening blogs. The 8th and 9th webpage were rarely updated blogs while the 10th webpage was a blog that didn’t allow comments.
At this point, I felt stuck in my search to find 2 more good gardening blogs to comment on.
9:25pm
Instead of going to the 2nd SERP, I tried a new search: most popular gardening blogs. The 1st webpage was the gardening blog on About.com. I expected to find a lot of comments. However, most of the posts did not have comments. Also, the posts were really short.
9:30pm
The About.com’s gardening blog had a small blogroll so I visited the blogroll links. I found two good blogs. The first is My Grandpa’s Garden. This blog had daily posts. And all the posts on the front page had at least one comment except for one post.
9:40pm
The second is Heavy Petal. As I was looking on this blog’s comments, I saw a commenter that had also posted on one of the other gardening blogs. I clicked through the commenter’s link and found this blog, Bumblebee Blog. The Bumblebee blogger had only posted 7 times so far in August. However, she had comments on every post.
9:50pm
I went through the blogs again to rank them. I had to drop the garden blog from Alaska, because they didn’t allow links for commenters.
Here’s how I ranked the blogs in commenting effectiveness:
- Cold Climate Gardening - most commented blog; 400 RSS subscribers gives evidence that it has a lot of traffic; only 3 posts in August because the blogger is taking a break; however, it’s a five year blog and July had many posts, so I think the blogger will continue posting regularly after her break
- My Grandpa’s Garden - most updated blog; also well-commented
- Tangled Branches Blog - 2nd most commented blog; also, the blogger does a great job interacting with her commenters
- Heavy Petal - well-commented but only 9 posts in August
- Bumblebee Blog - well-commented but only 7 posts in August; also, due to the blogging software, it takes two clicks to get to a commenter’s website
Two bloggers participated in this exercise so they get free links. First, Simon at Simon’s Money Notes posted about his experience. We didn’t find any of the same blogs. Second, Emma at Garden Ideas wrote about choosing gardening blogs. She’s already a gardening blogger, so she had a huge head start. I actually picked one of her five blogs.
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Dee,
I really liked the methodology you used to find popular blogs to comment on. I learned something valuable from your case study. for me, it was finding blogs I could actually read and stick with - within my niche - vs ones that were commented but bored me to tears. I supposed popularity should win in the end if you are trying to get your own name out there via comments.
thanks for the links and the great case study. It also helped the people I used IN my case study. One of the bloggers is considering moving away from blogger.com and onto a better platform because of my comments regarding trackbacks, etc.
regards,
emma
Glad I could help. It’s good to comment on well-commented blogs, because the many comments are evidence that the blog has traffic. However, it’s also hard to comment on blogs you don’t enjoy reading. I try to find blogs that I enjoy reading and are well-trafficked. These blogs are some of the best blogs to comment on.
By the way, I enjoyed reading your blog post. Good luck on your blogging!
Garden blogs are my niche and it was interesting to read the perceptions of an outsider. I noticed you skipped over Garden Voices on the SERP, which aggregates garden blogs and would have presented a huge blogroll to choose from. I also wonder if you would have gotten better results (from your perspective) if you had used Google’s Blog Search.
I did skip over Garden Voices. I tried to stay away from huge blogrolls because it’s hard to sort the high traffic blogs from the low traffic ones. That’s why I liked About.com’s small blogroll. Less blogs to look through and probably higher quality blogs than the average blog in a huge blogroll.
Thanks for the Google Blog Search suggestion. I don’t have much experience with it. I’ll have to check it out.
I was quite surprised at your method of using the basic google search to find blogs. When I’m looking for blogs in particular I use Google blog search and Technorati. Just type in ‘gardening’ as your search critera. The benefit to these methods is that you know that your search results are actual blogs.
I guess it boils down to what I’ve comfortable with. I have a lot more experience and skill with basic Google search than Google blog search and Technorati. However, I’ll definitely try those two next time.