I have spoken quite a lot recently, on this blog and on message boards, about how important commenting on other blogs can be in order to drive traffic to your own blog. For this post I wanted to tip it around 90 degrees and talk about attracting comments to your own blog.

When you first created your blog, and started writing content, did you do what I used to do and keep checking your admin panel to see if anyone had left you a comment on one of your posts? How often did you use to check? I would check probably about once an hour.

I don’t know about you but it used to drive me absolutely crazy.

It took me a good couple of months to go from watching my posts go without comments to thinking of ways to entice comments. I have listed five of those ways below.

1. Make Your Blog Do-Follow

This is something that I now do from day one with all my blogs. If you make your blog do-follow then it means when someone comments and they leave their web site URL then it will help them with their PR.

This encourages people to make comments better than anything else I have used.

2. Turn Off Your Spam Filter

If receiving tons of spam comments is not something you are concerned with then you could turn off any spam filter plugin you have running. I would not recommend this but then again I do receive thousands of spam comment posts a day.

3. Install Top Commentator Or CommentLuv Plugin

If setting your blog to do-follow is something that does not appeal to you then why not install a couple of plugins like top commentator and CommentLuv? What these two plugins do is reward commentators for commenting by publishing a do-follow link to their web site.

4. Run A Competition

This is something that I have tried and found partial success with. You run a contest and people enter by leaving a comment. It is as simple as that. You’ll be surprised how many people will comment when prizes are on the line.

The only drawback to this is that you will find lots of comments like “put my name down”, “I’m in” and “good luck everyone”.

5. Write A Very Controversial Post

This is something that not a lot of people will be able to pull off without coming across as an idiot. If you write a controversial post then you will make it almost impossible for the reader to leave without leaving his thoughts.

Be prepared to get some heated replies though and it isn’t something I’d recommend if you want to bond with your readers.

Have you found a way to attract comments that I have not listed? Why not leave a comment and let us know what they are?

am well aware that this post might not appeal to a lot of people but I do know that I attract quite a few newbie bloggers to this blog. So I thought I’d put out a post that was aimed mainly at them. More experienced bloggers might learn something as well.

When you first launch your blog you will find that Google is not very kind to you and you are receiving next to no traffic, apart from your friends and family members. There are many ways of increasing your traffic, you can use SEO, social media or advertising on PPC networks.

But these tend to cost money, or some considerable level of expertise, to really see the results. That is why the big bloggers like Dan Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker and John Chow seem to get fantastic results from them because they can afford to hire experts to do them.

But what about people like me? People who don’t have lots of money to spend on outside help? People who used to think that the term SEO was just a fancy title given to an executive like a CEO.

Below you will find a small list of ways to help that will not cost you an arm and a leg and do no require a lot of expertise.

1. Link Exchange With Other Blogs

If you have the time then why not contact other people who have blogs and ask them to swap links with them? This is no secret and has been around for years. The only problem with this is that some blog owners might try and cheat you by removing your link so keep checking their site.

2. Buy Links From Popular Blogs

This is something that I have never done because I do not agree with doing it. You can approach blogs and offer to pay them to link to your blog. The more popular the blog, and the higher their PR, the more you will have to pay.

Google comes down hard if you are caught doing this so be careful.

3. Guest Post On Other Blogs

If you are good at writing then you can offer to write a guest post on another blog. The blog owner gets some fresh content and you get to put a link or two in that article promoting your blog.

4. Write Articles For Article Directories

This is something that I am just now starting to experiment with myself. If you have some spare time then cobble together a selection of articles that are about your chosen niche and submit them to article directories. Don’t forget to mention your blog in them.

5. Post Regularly On Forums

I bet you are a member of at least two message boards. The first thing I do when I join a message board is I place the link to my blog in my sig. Every time I make a thread or reply to one my link shows up in my sig. I get quite a nice bit of traffic and link love from this.

Of course it will help if the message board you are part of is a popular one and you do have to post quite regularly (I make a habit of posting at least ten times a day).

6. Blog Commenting

This is quite easily my favourite way of link building and driving traffic to my blog. Why is it my favourite? Because it is free and because nine times out of ten I will stumble across great ideas for me to create posts about on my own blog.

Never spam blogs though, always try and make sure you have something to say instead of “nice post”. And try and find out if the blog is do-follow, these are the ones you should concentrate on more.

I stumbled across a neat little piece of software today. Something that I believe could help me (and you) gain some extra traffic from Twitter and it has nothing to do with setting up multiple accounts or spamming thousands of people.

When you post a tweet on Twitter there is normally a link under the tweet that says from Tweet Deck, Web, or what ever program you are using to send the message. This means that lots of companies are getting free traffic from piggybacking on your tweets.

That is where TweetBrand comes to the rescue and helps you take back those free links.

What TweetBrand does it is removes this link and replaces it with a link that you can decide upon. For example you can have a link to your own site and also anchor text of whatever you want.

It is free and it runs on Adobe Air which is also free. There is a very informative video to help you through the process which took me about 4 minutes to complete.

I am trying it on http://twitter.com/indblog so why not have a look and see if it is something that might interest you?