The Billevard

I am so excited about this new service that I can’t even begin to describe how excited I am except by saying that I am excited.

You don’t need to be a genius to see that online video is huge, but you do need to be smart to think of a way to profit off of it if you are a website owner.  RevLayer did just that, they created an advertising format that allows website publishers (blog owners, website owners, people with a website) to make money by displaying relevant advertisements over embedded videos on your website.  Now average shmoes like me can cash in on the video craze (through my website empire), well that is if people don’t mind watching videos with ad’s that you have to close before you watch it… which could make or break this whole idea… but let’s not get down on this new service just yet, because quite possibly it could be the largest revenue stream for many website owners.  Possibly.

Just think of the possibilities.  People master adsense and make a ton, now we have something that could be bigger, because let’s face it, people watch videos more than they read content (I’m basing this idea on the statistic that roughly 80% of online users are online for entertainment).

I left a nice comment to the article where I found out about this service here.   Join in on the discussion!  Let the writers of VentureBeat know you read it.

Don’t forget to leave trails, build bridges, and connect through comments.

Commenting on other people’s blogs for traffic is definitely a growing traffic strategy, it just hasn’t grown to the level that submitting articles to article directories has…. YET. I think commenting for traffic is 100% better than submitting articles to article directories, why do I think this?

I’ve got a couple of reasons why I think article directories are a waste of time…

• For one thing, real people don’t go to article directories. Think about it… do you spend hours upon hours just reading through articles (not just any articles, but junk articles because most people that submit them to these directories don’t take their time writing something worth reading) on article directory websites? Chances are you don’t, in most cases the only people that ever visit article directory websites are webmasters, and they are there for one reason… to submit their crappy, depth lacking articles. So many “guru’s” claim to high heaven that this is a must do tactic… submit your article to thousands of directories to get thousands of backlinks! Well I have something to say about these guru’s, while THEY may be writing quality articles, all they are doing and all they are promoting is the pollution of the internet with duplicate content. I don’t want to see an internet full of duplicate content, especially one where people take an article and change a couple words in it just so they can claim it as their own… this whole “private label articles” idea is BS. Whoever is supporting this nonsense should be beaten by chimpanzees holding bananas.
• The people that own article directories in most cases don’t care about the content slapped on the site. Now there are a couple of high quality article directories out there that only accept unique content, and those I am ok with, I just don’t see how submitting an article to a place real traffic doesn’t go to can help (real traffic meaning real people, as in not webmasters or lazy affiliate marketers that are trying to advertise a crappy affiliate program).

What does make sense to me is writing a nice in depth response to a blog post. Chances are there is another blog out there that is like yours, or one that has an audience that will appreciate your content. Comments are easier to write too… all you have to do is write a couple of sentences and you have a comment and a backlink, whereas writing an article means you have to think of a topic and write a lot more. Sure, you can use automated article submitters that will “SUBMIT YOUR ARTICLE TO THOUSANDS OF DIRECTORIES ACROSS THE WEB,” but why pollute the web with duplicate content and waste your time on a tactic that search engines don’t pay attention to.

So in short:

• It’s quality not quantity when it comes to search engines
• Go where the real people are
• Private label articles are a joke
• Comment on blogs that have your audience (but never EVER link drop in your comment)

Real people read blogs, they don’t read articles in article directories.

RSSPieces.com, a real estate blog that shows realetors how to blog online, wrote a great article about how to write appropriate comments on other’s blogs.   I found this post by searching for the keyword string “commenting for traffic” on google.  Dug, stumbled and bookmarked, everyone using the commenting for traffic method needs to read this article.

You can find the comment I left to the article here.

Mashable is the world’s largest community blog on social networking. On Mashable you can read about the latest social networking websites out there and catch up on the older ones like facebook and myspace. If you are into commenting for traffic and branding yourself across the web then getting yourself onto multiple communities is a must. Mashable is a great way to do just that and get in early on new networks.

You can make a personal profile on Mashable and comment on articles. So far I have only commented on a couple of articles and have already had about 200 profile views in just a month.

I recently added a link to this blog onto my Mashable profile under the My Networks section, so soon I’ll get to see how much traffic having and using a Mashable profile can get me. I’ll let you know the stats as I get them.

Side Note:

What also is great about having a Mashable account is that people can see what other networks you are on, so if they aren’t interested in checking out your website then maybe they’ll check out your profile on youtube, or your profile on stumbleupon as you can link to them all in one place.

I found a great article worth commenting on at LifeHack.org. The blog post is a how to article about firefox; how you can make it faster and what keyboard shortcuts you can use to browse the internet faster. I favorited it on my stumbleupon and digg accounts and left a nice comment towards the bottom.

I’m doing it, stumbling my way to higher traffic.  It should work shouldn’t it?  Top stumblers recieve hundreds of profile views a week, and a lot of them promote their own websites.

I created my profile and started stumbling right away because I have a lot of ground to cover.  The top stumbler likes over 22,000 pages, 1000 videos, 2000 photos, has 700 fans and recieved 185 reviews… so It will be a while before I get there.

My profile is here, I reviewed 5 websites already, and hope to review and favorite popular websites that I can get traffic from.  So if you want to find good blogs or websites that you can get additional traffic from by commenting on them then subscribe to my stumble favorites here.

You have probably written a comment on someone else’s webpage or blog at some point in your life, did you ever wonder how many people followed your comments to your profile or website? I did… and thats why I started this blog. I want to see how much traffic I can get by simply writing comments to other people’s blog posts, and by using social networking/community based websites.

When you write a comment on a blog, you can find a field in the comment form that allows you to link your comment to your website. The idea is, if they like what I say and who I am they will follow that comment back to my blog (this blog).

I have left the following guidelines… I cannot advertise my blog in any obtrusive ways. I must be entirely unobtrusive, all comments must be real and from the heart, I may not link drop, or any bologne like that. This is not a spam-till-I-get-traffic kind of experiment, it is a “I don’t write articles, I respond to them,” kind of experiment. If people are interested in what I said they will naturally seek me out by following the link from my comment to here.

It is a pretty simple idea for building traffic, one that doesn’t involve writing lengthy articles full of keyword rich content like so many website owners get enveloped in.

It will be interesting to see what kind of results I get, you can follow along by subscribing to this blog’s rss feed. I’ll leave a couple comments on other blogs and create accounts on other websites weekly and keep you up to date on the traffic I get in return.

Commenting for traffic, people do it (especialy bloggers), they just don’t know how well it works.

Let’s find out.

I left my first trail back to this website on my profile on ATB Riders, a mountainboarding community website that I use regularly.  I post comments on it regularly that I use to drive people to my profile where I link to this website.  It kind of is a watered down way to drive people to your website through commenting.

Can you find my link? (It is suttle)