I have a great problem today.  I had four or five things that I wanted to blog about, but I only have time for one blog post.

For example, some of you may have heard that my good friend Josh Spaulding, who teaches people how to make money online, has recently released an update to his incredibly popular free five dollar formula e-book.  I'd love to do a review of that, but since it's completely free, I encourage you to get over there and read it yourself.   You'll learn everything you need to know to drive traffic to niche websites and monetize them with Google AdSense.

My second choice for a blog post today (that I decided to pass on) was the topic of  income taxes.  Yuck.   This is the first full year since I started making money online that I have had to do with deal with thousands of transactions.  I am a little frustrated with myself that I didn't keep better records during the year, and I'm trying to do much better for 2009.  I am very interested in understanding the best way to handle tracking all of the different transactions that I complete during a year, and will reserve this topic fora future series of posts.

A Bunch Of Garbage Blog Comments

This morning I woke up and logged on to my blog and found that I had seven comments from new commenters. I'm always pleased to see new comments, because that means people are reading my blog and have something to add.   I try to answer each and every comment on my blog,  because I value both the comment and the time commenters invest contributing to my content.

Imagine my disappointment this morning when I found four of the seven comments were totally garbage just cluttering up my comment inbox.  I get these all the time. They waste my time, your time, and server bandwidth.  I thought you would enjoy seeing them so I've posted them here.

bad-coments

My absolute favorite is the guy who called me a guru using two different names pointing back to two different URLs.

Now I'm sure that at some point some Black Hat Internet Marketer sold some one some very expensive software to go out and find blogs corresponding to particular keywords and then automatically leave comments on this blog. I am sure that this was very appealing to some Internet business person who was looking for something for nothing.

My problem with this is that a completely misses the larger opportunity that comes from making helpful comments on blogs.

Good Comment Outcomes

When you make really thoughtful blog comments that add value to a post,  number of good things can happen to you.  The one that is most often talked about is the situation where you are one of the first commenters on a high-traffic post, and you make a great comment. People will tell you that readers of the post will see your comment, and click through to your blog. This is absolutely true and can provide you some temporary traffic.

Occasionally, you may find yourself commenting on a do-follow blog, that provides do-follow links back to your blog .  (In fact, this blog does this for commenters with more than 9 coments).

This can certainly help you with search engine ranking, but you'll usually find that these posts (the actual permalink where the post appears) have low page rank, at least initially. This means that you should not expect to get a massive amount of link juice from these types of comments.

The Real Value Of Excellent Comments

Both of the outcomes above are absolutely correct.   The problem is people who are focused on these sorts of outcomes miss the real opportunity.  In my opinion the real opportunity of leaving excellent blog comments lies in the relationships that you develop with excellent bloggers.  Once you've developed relationships with other bloggers, what you really have are opportunities for growing your business the through the conversations, friendships, business ideas, joint ventures, and product opportunities that come out of such interactions.

It's an old saying: it's not what you know it's who you know.

I'll give you a couple of examples.  When I first started my blog,I had no clue what I was doing. I searched around Google and started finding examples of bloggers who are successful and reading their work.   Basically I found three that I decided to follow long-term.

Garry Conn is the first example.   Gary is a top-notch Blogger and one of the busiest guys I know.  When I was first getting started, I commented on Garry's blog asking for advice via a phone call system that he had set up at the time.  Not only did Gary use my phone call as part of his content, but Garry also called me back and we have been working together and trading ideas ever since.  He even designed this very blog theme.  Now, I consider Garry a friend.

Josh Spaulding is another example.  I was so impressed with Josh's e-book Article Marketing Domination eBook and his ethical approach to Internet marketing that I started commenting on his blog.  Now, I am a moderator in Josh's coaching form, and we have worked together on several joint venture projects.  I also consider Josh a friend.

The bottom line is relationships

Really when you get down to it, Internet marketing is not any different than my off-line business of semiconductor microelectronics. Getting things done and being successful is all about relationships.  Relationships with customers, relationships with coworkers, relationships with business partners, and relationships with suppliers.

If you want to be successful Internet marketing, focus on building relationships with people you respect and with customers you value and you can't go wrong.

Have a great day,

Mark

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