This is a guest post by Tushar Agarwal from BloggersPassion.
Promotion is the only way to keep a blog alive. It is always said that good content is nothing without traffic. The quality of the content does matter but if nobody come to your blog, what is the use of that content. It will not get the laurels it deserves and this is sure to discourage you.
90% of the bloggers use free methods of promoting which sometimes work and sometimes does not.
But ask any seasoned blogger about the best way to promote a blog without spending a single penny and the most common answers you will hear are COMMENTING and GUEST BLOGGING.
These are the most used methods and often leave us with a debate on which is the best among the two. Both have its advantages and I am trying to find out the best between these two based on two common metrics.
1. Effort
Obviously, guest blogging takes much more effort than commenting. For promoting the blog through COMMENTING, you just need to go to a blog, click on the post that you understand and comment. Many “desperate for traffic” commentators do not even bother to read what is there in the post. They are more interested in leaving their link there and waiting for traffic.
On the other hand, GUEST POSTING takes a lot of effort, you have to be at your very best to deliver the best article and that require as much time as your own blog’s post needs. A bad guest post can very easily backfire because:
- The blog author can easily reject it citing reasons that you are just posting to get the visitors and the quality is missing. He might also not consider your future posts as FIRST IMPRESSION IS THE LAST IMPRESSION.
- Even if your bad guest post gets published, readers will eventually find out that this was nothing more than a guest post. Just 300 words of crap to get the back link and traffic can force them to avoid you, your posts and your blog in the future.
2. Result
When it comes to the end result you wanted, the traffic, guest blogging leaves commenting way behind. With a good quality guest post published in a blog with huge traffic, do not be surprised if you get few hundred hits in a day.
Commenting can never get you this much number of visitors even if you put in as much time as you put in your post. Moreover, if your comment is not in the first 5, you might not even get noticed and your little effort will go in vain.
Only guest posting can get you traffic that you want, all it requires is that little extra effort.
But as everything, guest blogging has some disadvantages. First, you have to write your best post to attract the traffic. This post could have been on your blog but it could not happen. Second, if you make a wrong choice of the blog where you will be posting, you might not get enough traffic and your effort goes waste.
Still, guest blogging is one of those ways that can get you tonnes of traffic. There is a merrier side of guest blogging. There are many blogs that offer revenue sharing i.e. you get Adsense revenue for the ads that are clicked on the page your post is displayed, provided you have entered your Adsense publication id.
At The End…
I encourage everyone of you reading this post to participate in this debate between commenting and guest posting. And do not forget to participate in our poll below.
[poll id=”6″]
I agree that Guest blogging if done correctly can bring in tons of targeted traffic. But on the other hand regular commenting can also help you a great deal in getting traffic, improving your Alexa ranking and even boost your page rank (if the commenting is done on DoFollow blogs like mine)!
.-= TechChunks´s last blog ..35 Interesting But Lesser Known Facts about Google, ‘The Search Engine King’ =-.
I think guest bolgging is better. But it is hard to get guest blogger for all new and non popular blog.
Guest blogging is huge in the housing sector of blogging. Generally, the links are strong and if the title is done properly, there is traffic to gain.
.-= Colleen@Kennewick Real Estate´s last blog ..Tri Cities Has Lowest Cost of Living in the State =-.
I often use blog commenting but also do others things like social websites and forums, they are all effective and i will start guest post and press release soon. Nice post, thanks.
I think guest blogging is very much better than commenting and at the same time i fell that one should try both guest blogging as well as commenting because both have its own advantages . . . . . . .
Guest blogging is a successful situation for both bloggers. It helps to build traffic for both blogs and develop relationship with other bloggers. Guest blogging is much better than commenting, because it can drive huge amount of traffic when you write a guest post and publish it on another blog.Through guest posting you can develop relationship with other blogger and drive more visitors towards your blog.
We’re just started guest blogging and wrote a blog on why businesses should do it (as part of our own research!): http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/why-should-i-be-guest-blogging/
We are quite literally seeing it as replacement for link-building on sites like EZine, and I hope it will be a much more worthwhile way of getting traffic to our own site/blog.
Natasha
.-= Silicon Beach Training´s last blog ..A PRINCE2 Training iPhone app… =-.
I think Comments are better then guest post until unless you are guest posting on a blog with huge traffic. My experience of Guest Blogging is not so good so I prefer comments.
Commenting is the way to go for me. People keep talking about guest posting being a huge traffic spiker but commenting has actually been what drives some level of traffic to my blog.
I prefer commenting.Because I don’t have enough time to write for others.
.-= Lakhyajyoti´s last blog ..How To Monetize Your Blog =-.