In this article I want to talk about blog hopping, in case you don’t know what blog hopping is, blog hopping is a very effective way of driving traffic and it is often overlooked.

This process simply involves commenting on other peoples blogs, just going to other blogs related to yours and leaving comments, then you simply ‘hop’ from blog to blog and leave comments, and that is where the term blog hopping comes from.

You gain traffic by linking back to your blog, product or service in the comment you leave, obviously when you leave a blog comment you leave a name and website address and the website address links back to your product or service. If done right, this is a very powerful traffic technique.

The first thing you need to do if you want to start blog hopping is find blogs related to your niche, my advice is to simply search for blogs in your niche by searching for the niche keyword + blog. for example if you wanted to search for traffic blogs you would just go to google and search “traffic blogs” that would bring up a ton of blogs in your niche. You should also look for related forums and check peoples signatures, for example if I was looking for traffic related blogs, I would obviously be looking in traffic forums and people would be commenting about driving traffic and some would have links to their blogs, that’s one way of finding blogs as well.

You also want to check comments already left of your blog, people who are already leaving comments are probably leaving comments to get back links from your blog to their blog, the chances are it’s going to be related. You should also look for experts in your niche and see if they have a blog, so obviously you will probably know who these people are, or if you do your research you probably will, then it’s just a case of seeing if they have a blog.

You can also look in blog directories, blog directories are just exactly what it says, just directories where you can search for blogs in specific niches, if you do a google search for blog directories, you will find a ton.

Let me give you some blog hopping tips, the first thing you want to do is subscribe to the blogs RSS feed so you know when new posts are made, obviously you’ll recall there is a little RSS icon somewhere on the blog, where you will be informed when new posts are made so make sure you do that. Because you want to try to get your posts in early.

When a fresh post appears on a blog you can usually count on a lot of traffic hitting it pretty quickly because sometimes what happens, especially when an author makes a new post, they announce it and this often means mailing their subscribers and followers, so if you're one of the first people to comment, your comment is going to be seen by the most traffic so that is what you need to be trying to do, get the posts in early.

This is very important, make your comments informative, you don’t want to just be saying “that’s a nice post” or “great post” you need to be giving value, if you can reply with something that is interesting and informative then people are going to want to check you out so make sure your comments are informative.

Don’t be afraid to disagree with someone, if you believe in something and you know your stuff or you’re experienced enough to do this, disagree if you have to, because what you will find is, controversy or a little argument on a blog drives tons of traffic. I love it when someone puts something on my blog that other people don’t like or that people don’t agree with because it strikes a conversation and they keep coming back and wanting to see more, everyone leaves more comments, this gets picked up by google which drives traffic and then your comments get seen and you get clicks to your sites.

At the same time I am not saying you should go around disagreeing with everything you read, I just mean if you see something and you have a good strong point to make, then don’t be afraid to do it, because controversy does sell, I’m sure you’ve seen arguments on Facebook and things like that, and you might keep an eye on it to see what happens. I know I have, and its the same with blogs.

Make sure you subscribe to replies and follow up if needed, most of the time when you leave a comment, there is a little tick box you can tick which will mean you get an email if replies are made, obviously then you can keep an eye on whats been talked about, and if you need to follow up, make sure you do. Again, this is very important.

Blog hopping should be part of your daily routine, this is definitely something everyone should be doing it’s one of the most effective and simplest ways to drive traffic, so please make sure you don’t disregard blog hopping.