Referral Traffic : Why Build Backlinks That Have No SEO Value?
In this post, we are going to talk about why you should build blog commenting backlinks in general.
As you might already know, the “no-follow” blog comment links are believed to have very little or almost no SEO value. – Even though, the backlink experiment experiment I conducted showed a different story, the primary focus of building blog comment links should be for referral traffic.
The power of referral traffic
Since I decided to focus on generating income from Amazon affiliate program in 2016, I immediately started looking for blogs that talked about Amazon affiliate program.
The primary purpose is to see what kind of success that other people are achieving with Amazon affiliate program, but at the same time I was reaching out to them by commenting on their blog.
As a result, I started getting more and more referral traffic from these sites.
I started this activity in January 2016 and after a few weeks, the referral traffic strated to increase (blue line).
In case you wonder what happened last year that caused the sudden spike in referral traffic, it was because of an experiment I did with LinkedIn forums. I basically shared some links from Digital Ready Marketing and they got viral.
How to find relevant blogs to post the comment links?
Unlike backlink building activity for ranking purpose, we need to take a different approach for building referral traffic.
Step 1) Step up your gravatar
The places you are going to post comments will likely be visited by the same group of people. This is where you can build trust and authority.
By using Gravatar, the same picture thumbnail will show up automatically. Imagine people seeing your picture again and again next to the comment you post. They would want to find out more about who you are by clicking the link.
Step 2) Find relevant blogs with high traffic
The concept is pretty simple. Look for popular blogs that are relevant to what you are promoting. The more people are visiting these blogs the better.
We can find them pretty easily by just doing Google search on popular terms such as “Amazon affiliate rates”.
Step 3) Read the content and post valuable comment
I know this takes time but in order for us to post valuable comment – the one that gets people to read and makes them want to find out more about us – we need to provide value.
The screenshot below illustrates that point. I found a blog that talked about how the site owner’s Amazon affiliate account got shut down.
I offered my thought / experience and posted a link back to the post that explained how I recovered my Amazon affiliate account.
Not only my comment was approved, the site owner also thanked me for the comment.
Step 4) Answer someone else’s questions
In addition to provide valuable comments, you can also answer questions that are posted by other site visitors.
When it comes to guest post, a lot of time the author is not aware of the questions posted in the comment section and many such questions are left unanswered.
By helping the author / blog owner to answer these questions, your blog comment will more likely be approved rather than deleted.
What do you think?
In my opinion, building referral traffic should be an important tactic for the overall traffic generation strategy. The more places where people see you and your site, the more likely they will remember you and your site.
It’s also important to note that synchronizing the profile thumbnail is important. That consistency could make people think of you as an authority – or at least I did when I saw someone appearing again and again on different websites, discussion about a specific topic.
Do you agree? Let me know in the comment section.
I build websites and use them for testing various SEO strategies and tactics.
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nice post, brother
doing good job,
Thank you Paresh.
referral traffic value goes down at later stage in most cases. But adding backlinks (no follow-high DA) gives some referral traffic as compared to having no traffic at all