Don’t Mangle Your Comment Backlink, You’re Losing Visitors
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You know how you read a great blog post and get to the bottom of it and someone’s made a truly stellar comment? You know how you think to yourself, “holy mackerel, that was a good comment, who the heck is this person?” (Don’t tell me you don’t say holy mackerel! ok, ok, you probably say “shazam!” or “zoinks!”, but you get my point, ya?)
Anyway, let’s say you then attempt to click on the person’s name in the comments and check out their site. And it doesn’t work. The commenter mistyped the URL. Horrors! You’re sad. You can’t find out who this amazing person is. You’ll never know what else they might have to say. And the name they typed in was something like “Dan”. Argh, how will I ever search for that?
BUT you’re not half as upset as the person who mistyped their URL in the comments box would be if only they knew.
The commenter has completely lost the greater opportunity to join the conversation web-wide; they’re only conversing on that little blog post floating in the info-ether with no link back to their site. Such a great comment and they get no search engine, or pagerank credit whatsoever for having made the effort. And all because of a little typo. Now that hurts.
Here’s how I avoid this problem altogether: I use a text replacement application that fills in a complete text snippet whenever I type a key word.
So, for instance, I type “hms” (no quotes) and that immediately expands to http://honestmarketingsecrets.com. Can you imagine how much time I save? The most important things I type over and over again are deadly accurate every time. I will never go back to plain old typing.
In fact, the program I use tells me how many hours of my life I’ve saved since I started using it. So far I’m up to about an hour and I’m still adding snippets. I’ve actually saved over 22,000 keystrokes since I started using it.
And never, ever, not once have I gotten my URL wrong in a comment box. Every time I comment, I am guaranteed to get a working backlink to my site.
I think I’ve made my point.
If you’re on a Mac, get Text Expander and watch the excellent video demonstrating it over at TWiT TV.
If you’re on Windows, try Texter, or AutoHotKey.
Here’s a Texter video from Lifehacker that shows just how useful this can be:
February 8th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Thank you so much! I love to comment on posts that I feel are valuable (or aggravating) and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve hit the submit key before I thought to add my url. I gotta go get this - Thanks Again!
Brennan Kingsland’s last blog post..Visual Education!
February 8th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Brennan, I’m very glad you found it useful. Thanks for commenting and have fun saving hours and hours of your life.
February 8th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Hey Zack,
SO true..! I’m so paranoid about mistyping my url that I use both roboform and have my url copied in a text file. I just copy and paste it each time if I’m on a PC without my roboform installation.
Cheers,
Martin.
Martin’s last blog post..The turning point – when you start to become successful
February 10th, 2008 at 10:02 am
Great information. I intend to give it a shot.
RickH’s last blog post..SEO for Wordpress Posts
February 11th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I use this greasemonkey script. Alt-C fills in my info for me.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/22048
engtech’s last blog post..Book Review: Everyware by Adam Greenfield
February 14th, 2008 at 1:37 am
Martin, this is a great supplement to Roboform as it works throughout your system and can expand whole paragraphs of text and save hours of writing time.
Rick, glad you liked it and hope it’s useful . . .
engtech, thanks for that resource, good to know about that one . . .
February 14th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Great tip. Thanks. Anything that saves you time, makes your life a little easier and more productive is cool.
Wasn’t my favorite song on the video though.
Mark McCullagh’s last blog post..Hang Out With Social Marketing Mavens
February 17th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Hey Mark, glad you liked it. I use these tools constantly and couldn’t live without them. Thanks for stopping by.
March 6th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
thank you so much for this useful information. it’s great to feel that someone has provided a real service. And for someone like me who has to breathe when it comes to the so called technical stuff (for fear of making an error). I thank you.
Zandriana’s last blog post..Best Corporate Apology - Ever!
March 6th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Hi Zandriana, I’m thrilled you found the post useful! Thanks for stopping by and commenting.
March 28th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Very useful information
I see there are realy good tips. I am going to use some of them