Social media can be all about networking and building relationships with others in your field. Through blogs, Twitter, Flickr, and other online resources I have “met” and developed relationships with dozens if not hundreds of photographers and other professionals. One of the best ways to build these relationships over time is also one of the easiest: leave comments on blogs.
Let’s quickly talk about the mechanics of leaving a comment. Leave your name, your email address, and (assuming you have a website), your website or blog’s URL. When it asks for your name, leave your actual name. Your name is not “Boston Wedding Photographer” or “Cheap Event Photography” or “Seattle Senior Pictures.” Some less-than-helpful SEO guys will try to convince you otherwise, but at this stage in the evolution of the web, trying to stuff keywords into blog comments is just spammy.
A good blog comment will (hopefully) provide value to both the person leaving the comment as well as the blog on which the comment is left. If you’re the one leaving the comment, you’re injecting yourself onto the radar of the blogger. Every time someone leaves a comment on one of my posts, I make sure to read it thoroughly and (if the commenter left a URL) check out the person’s website. If their website is interesting, I’m going to bookmark it or subscribe to the RSS feed. In short: if you leave a comment on one of my blogs, there’s a good chance I’m going to become a regular reader of your blog.
Over time, as one leaves comments multiple times on the same blog, you’ll start to be a known quantity to the blogger. Bloggers remember the people that leave meaningful comments on their blogs. Blog comments are a great way to do some virtual networking and build up relationships with peers, vendors, and other voices.
Do you leave blog comments as often as you’d like?
Photo by Barsch28, used under Creative Commons licensing
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