Sep
How to Use Comment Sniper For a .500% Boost in Traffic
Even though I have the Comment Sniper software installed on my computer and admit that it does what it’s supposed to do, I rarely ever use it. The big problem is that the whole “blog commenting” strategy takes a lot of manual labor.
So today I’m going to show you exactly how Blog Commentator works and what results it can bring, so you can make your own decision about using it.
So here’s how to use Comment Sniper…
First, you need to download the software from CommentSniper.com and then install it.
Then you open it, and this is the first screen you get to when you start:
First thing you’ll want to do is setup the blogs to monitor. Go to the “Blog Manager” tab and click “add blog” and you’ll get this screen:
In most cases you’ll choose “other” to handle self-hosted Wordpress blogs, although there is built-in support for free blogspot and wordpress.com blog monitoring.
Let’s say you want to monitor JohnChow.com. You’ll enter in this information:
Blog host: other
Name: johnchow
URL: http://www.johnchow.com/
Feed (xml): http://feedproxy.google.com/JohnChowDotCom
Title: [just choose the default]
Repeat this step for all the blogs you wish to monitor. Once you have added all the blogs you want, you can go back to the initial welcome screen and click “Start.” Then you’ll see this screen:
That means it is monitoring for new posts.
Once everything is setup and running, if there is a new post on any of the blogs you are monitoring, you’ll get a pop-up like this:
You can just click this box and you’ll be taken to the website in your default web browser.
Here’s my one complaint – clicking it takes you to the blog, instead of the specific post. That requires an extra click before you can get to the single post page and therefore the comment form.
I’m surprised there isn’t a $167 premium version of Comment Sniper that takes you straight to the post, because obviously you have a way better chance at being the first comment if you don’t waste time with that extra click!
But until that paid version comes out, the free version works nicely.
Yeah, Comment Sniper Actually Works
I put Comment Sniper to the test to see if I could get the #1 commentator spot. In this test I was the first commentator 100% of the time! (Only once have I ever been the second commentator when using Comment Sniper.)
Here are a few examples of what happens when you use Comment Sniper:
CopyBlogger.com
See it for real: copyblogger.com
DailyBlogTips.com
See it for real: dailyblogtips.com
JohnChow.com
See it for real: johnchow.com
ZacJohnson.com
See it for real: zacjohnson.com
ShoeMoney.com
See it for real: shoemoney.com
JohnChow.com (again)
See it for real: johnchow.com
ProBlogger.net
See it for real: problogger.net
Some of those posts saw a lot of traffic and a lot more comments after I left mine, so you would think that all the other commentators would have noticed my #1 comment and maybe even clicked my name.
We’ll see…
Does Comment Sniper Bring In Serious Traffic?
I did those comments on Tuesday, August 26, 2008. The following screenshots are from the morning of Friday, August 29, 2008. So this is roughly three full days after leaving the comments.
Let’s see what happened with my traffic stats:
(These screenshots are from the “referring sites” section of Google Analytics.)
ProBlogger.net leads the way with a whopping 6 referrals, who stayed at my website an average of 3 seconds. Wow! (That’s the only blog from the experiment that made it into my top 10 referrals.)
The other blogs in the above screenshot were not part of the experiment, but I left them in anyway. VillageWit.org is a humor blog that linked here because of funny stories, like the “Four Hour Workweek” one in our “Real News” category. BlackHatPlanet.com is one of those autoblogs that consists of paragraphs pulled from various internet marketing blogs. That one really surprised me – I didn’t think that site would send any traffic here! And I don’t know anything about EZBusinessNeeds.com, except that the guy has been leaving quite a few comments around here lately, so I thought I’d mention his site for good measure.
Coming in at spot #11, CopyBlogger.com sent me some decent traffic. It was only 3 visits, but the visitors actually stuck around my site for a minute or two.
ZacJohnson.com, another blog from the experiment, sent me 2 visitors, although both of them left after a grand total of 0 seconds!
I haven’t commented at DoshDosh.com for ages, but it still sent me 1 visitor this week! (Who also stayed for 0 seconds!)
The real gem on this page was TucsonSEOSolutions.com, sending me 2 visitors who averaged well over 1 full hour on my site! I’ll gladly take those 2 interested visitors over ProBlogger’s 6 visitors who stayed for 3 seconds!
Here are the other two blogs from the experiment, practically in last place out of all my referring sites. JohnChow.com resulted in 1 single visitor who stayed for 0 seconds, putting that blog as the worst blog to comment on (despite how I was the #1 commentator on two of the posts!) ShoeMoney.com also sent me a single visitor, although this person stuck around to see 8 pages over the course of 29 minutes!
You might be wondering, “how is that a 500% boost in traffic?”
To be clear, that’s not “a 500% boost” in the title. It’s .500%, which could also be written as .5%, which is half of one percent. 
You’ll see that the traffic increase from these comments was basically 0% above average.
However, it would be totally true and not deceptive at all for me to claim that this method resulted in a 500% boost in traffic! Because getting 13 visitors is a huge increase over the days when I first started this blog, when I was the lone visitor!
(Of course, there’s no affiliate link for Comment Sniper, so this whole thing was a big waste!)
But back to the traffic… I see 13 visitors that came from this day of blog commenting. The vast majority had a 100% bounce rate and spent 0 minutes and 0 seconds on my site. But a couple people stayed for 20-30 minutes! That’s pretty sweet!
So the traffic volume was very low, but a few people seemed to enjoy my site, and maybe they even subscribed to my feed!
Was it worth it? I’ll let you decide. It really didn’t take too much time to comment, and if I picked up a new fan or two, that’s pretty cool. Your results may vary.
Let me finish with…
A few words of advice about Comment Sniping
1) Don’t be first to comment all the time, on every blog. It could get suspicious or just plain annoying. (And you don’t want any more people to catch on to this Comment Sniper software, do you?)
2) Make sure you leave an intelligent, insightful, or obnoxious comment that will get attention. If you just post “first!” or “i like this post” you’ll get virtually no benefit. (Unless you do it all the time and eventually get attention from being super annoying… or if the post is anything like this one.)
If you have good results with this, be sure to leave a comment and let me know!
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Good grief. I think I have multiple people using this on my blog. Your comments were excellent and would never be classified as spam, but the flow of worthless comments I get solely because of the link back led to my You’re a Comment Spammer post this morning.
I don’t mind people commenting — even if they’re doing it solely for the link — as long as they contribute something useful (as you did in your examples). Heck, that’s the whole reason I yes-follow.
Hey, just snipped this post. (Insert insightful comment here).
I’ve used Comment Sniper for a while…
@Hosting Review
And I’ve been using it for nearly a year, since the day it came out. What’s your point? Do you have anything insightful to share about your experiences?
I am building a piece of software called comment snooper. It does the same thing as comment sniper, but it alerts you .3 seconds faster that a new post has been added to the blogs you are tracking. Those .3 seconds can be the difference between 1 visitor who stays for 3 seconds on your site and 2 visitors who stay for 5 seconds! And in the hyper-competitive world of comment sniping, those .3 seconds can be an eternity.
@Will
Sign me up! I would certainly pay up to $497 for such software!
Thats a fantastic interpretation. The one deep study I have seen in recent days. Good, some knowledge is added to us.
I guess your review wasn’t scathing enough to have Duncan Carver send a fellow named Dominique to your blog to berate you like he did here: http://internetmarketingsucks.com/blog/2008/03/18/answer-sniper-more-yahoo-answers-spam/
That was hilarious. Maybe if you had just made it a little more scathing, Carver’s fanboys (who obviously aren’t getting paid by Carver or are Carver in disguise) would have dropped by here.
Greaaaaaaaaaaat post. By the way this post is not from comment sniper.lol. I just feel sad for people who are making a living doing blog commenting after this post about comment sniper. Are you planning to do any post about the do-follow blogs list or something like that?.
I do not need to be the first to comment, but i ensure that at least my comment contributes to a certain degree so that it gets a permanent link back. What is the point of using a comment snipper to get the first post but you wrote rubbish that gets deleted by moderator? – Rif Chia
I love the way your write, it is always so entertaining, I will definitely check out comment sniper, I am always coming in like 56 on Shoemoney and the quickest I’ve ever made it to Chow is 24, so this should be interesting.
Thanks,
JR
@Jackson
Yeah I’m waiting for Dominique to come back and harass me!
Interesting post. I think it proves that commenting is generally best used to develep relationships with bloggers or alternatively as a way to compliment your link building efforts rather than a way to bring in mass traffic.
@Advertising Ideas & Tips
I do agree that commenting on blogs is a good way to build relationship with the blog owner as well as interacting with the readers. It may not bring you good traffic flow but it definitely helps in link building. However, if done wrongly by means of spamming, it will only be branding your site as a spammer site.
hi. This is my first time here. I thought you want to say that internet marketing is sucks, and it is just wasting time. I fall for it. Nice blog.
Well, considering I am the 16th post here let it be no surprise to anyone I do not use comment sniper.
I can’t really comment to comment, merely found a buch of blogs I like [this one] grabbed the feed and go from there. I don’t ever shut up in real life, so commenting is no problem to me, always willing to bore folks with mu opinions.
Seems a good software to use. And this could help a lot in driving more traffic from the website. Thanks for sharing some tips and for this new software you’ve found.
Another reason why internet marketing sucks!
Most of those software are not only a waste of time, money and effort, but they are quite annoying.
Hey, but what do I know!
I still think you can use it effectively both ways if you implement educated strategies and do your due diligence. But that is often the case with anything.
Hi Sucker, it was for the benefit of our visitors that i included your blog at our corporate website. Found your blog very interesting especially when the posts are about internet marketing related matters and would really like to share with our visitors. Cheerz.
The numbers aren’t very exciting.
Rather disappointing and makes me wonder why all the people are talking about all the traffic you can get from commenting on blogs.
I’m going to try this out, it looks very helpful, even if the traffic you get back isn’t very wild… thanks again man! Keep up the work.
Hmm… I am all about this. I had never heard of comment sniper before, this is an awesome tool and you are being added once I download it for giving me this tip.
Really nice concept and structure of your blog. If someone comments on my blog, I approve it regardless if it is positive or negative feedback from them. Some software are just a waste of time, IMO!
Thanks for the great tool. I’ll try out “comment sniper” and see where it takes me. I’ll post a comment here again on my review on the tool.
Havent heard of comment sniper before…Will try to use it, as it sounds interesting….
Very interesting! Although the increase in traffic volume seems low, it’s definitely worth it. It doesn’t take much time to comment on a post so why shouldn’t we do it.
So, this is basically an RSS feed reader, isn’t it?
@Yritt
Not quite, since you can’t actually read anything with it. It’s more of a “feed notifier” if you will.
I am going to try it because I currently use CommentKahuna and its big drawback is you cannot use your own blog list. You have to use its lists of blogs.
So, with Comment Sniper if I could use it to comment on my favorite sites, would help me get to a vaunted status of Top Commenter. For showmoney and others, that is a nice place to be as that is where links are dofollow.
I agree that the time involved may not at all justify the traffic. I’ve used Comment Kahuna here and there and spent lots of time trying to find a related blog to comment on but never really seen any traffic from it.
We’ve done extensive testing with using blog comments as traffic generators – and the results are dismal for the amount of time that it takes. Although, I might add that these comments work better for NON-MARKETING niches than they do in our very cynical marketing niche.
However, blog comments can be outstanding for link power. Everybody wants to use a piece of software that will just plug in their links, but in general that doesn’t work. Or, it doesn’t work for long. If you’re in this for the long haul, don’t waste your time on the spammy junk. Taking the time to write thoughtful comments can result in some outstanding links just because the get-rich-quick crowd can’t be bothered.
Getting traffic through comments is not bad, but it won’t ensure any link juice. I think the software should have additional options to check the page rank and ‘Nofollow’ tags.
I would try that the problem is I’d have to be sat on my computer 24/7 just waiting for these alerts
That is hard to do. 24/7 in the computer I can’t do that.
its annoying to do manual comment work after knowing about comment snipper but what to do have to wait until it gets downloaded…
Very informative. Worth the trial. Thanks.
Tracy Benungski
Commenting is very labor intensive but so let’s get the most traffic we can from that effort.I find using it a worth while tool.
I never heard of this program before, thanks for the tutorial on it. I’ll have to look into it, not a huge fan of putting a lot of work into something that might not be worth it but like you said some may like it and some may not.
Sounds like an interesting piece of software. However, it just confirms to me that commenting on no-follow blogs is a waste of time. Unless you’re a fan of course. =)
Nice software, But I prefer Manual comment on blog.
Nice review! Yeah, I’d rather manually comment on blogs than use some software. It allows me to be more thoughtful in what I write.
@Nintendo W and Bookmarking D
You still have to manually comment on the blogs when you do this. All this does is tell you when there is a new blog post – you do the rest.
Doesn’t sound like a good investment for what you get in return.
Wow great post! Thanks for the information.
You become one of my favorite writer, now i have to try sniper, you always comes with good information. thx keep it up…
Gosh, what I nice application. And also thanks for the tutorial…
If it cuts down on bots and east indian spam I’m all for it.
It is almost the same with comment kahuna .instead we need first to search which one blog with ,comment luv,do follof etc,etc,etc.But i will give it a try.thanks for the post.
Whoa … so, where does CommentSniper rise above RSS aggregators? Being mobile?
@uberwriter
RSS readers are for reading the feed, this is just for notifying you that a new post is up. It doesn’t take up any screen real estate, so you can run it all the time with ease.
The best way I can explain it is that the two serve different purposes.
@Sucker
When a feed has been updated/changed, the title appears in bold. Hence, you ARE alerted to what’s been updated — I guess the hook is the immediacy of CommentSniper. But, is such a tiny advantage enuff reason to download/install/bounce between more software even if it’s free? Hmm.
Comment Sniper is immediate and takes up no screen real estate. To see the bold headlines in a feed reader, you’d actually need to open the feed reader.
I know it’s a small benefit, but for some people, it’s worthwhile.
(On a sidenote, whenever I first used it, I thought it was the dumbest software ever, so it’s not like I’m defending Comment Sniper…)
I mean as long as your comments are relative then its a good way to build backlinks
I personally find this no different from RSS readers and also no incentive to be the first. I wonder how it is going to be like if you add half of all blogs in the world.
I’ve used Comment Sniper a long time ago but I gave up, frankly. Then again – I don’t do a lot of SEO and am WAY out of date with the latest (is the Keyword metatag still important??… LOL).
Meh – maybe it IS worth it in the long term. If those comments provide a 0.5% increase in the short term, then maybe over the long term with some consistent effort you might get a cumulative effect – especially if the original topic gets more traffic.
Hey, this is a really good review of Comment Sniper.
I can really see how this would help me out and you got to like the fact that it is free (for now).
I’ll suggest that if you use this on a continuous basis, then over the course of time, the results will get impressive.
Wow, this is a really nice tool, I didn’t know you could get such a thing, when I first started reading about this, I thought that it was going to be a spam tool, but I’m so glad that it’s not
Thanks a lot again!
Could you please explain why being the first person to comment is so desirable? What’s wrong with being the 2nd person?
@XiiTec
It’s kind of like being listed #1 in Google. Whether it’s the blog author reading through the comments, or just a visitor scanning down, there’s a slightly better chance that your comment will be seen and your link clicked.
Having comment #2 would be pretty good as well, but on some very popular blogs you have to really pay attention just to be in the top 10 comments.
The purpose here is to get Back link “Sucker” to boost SEO ranking, not really targeting blog user at all in this case. Have fun and good luck!
Nice tool will try it.
wow! this is one hell of a great idea. I am really impressed with the software functionality as well its free availability. Thanks for sharing.
Yeah but, does this stuff really work? Or do you just get a bunch of not-so-helpful links?
Sounds like a real good software.Shall try it out myself.However if everyone is using the same software, will you still get the #1 commentator place?
I prefer an RSS reader in Opera. It works similarly to this – every time there’s a new post I get a notification in my right corner. And I can instantly head over there to comment if I feel like it.
that’s great post here for us.i think so commenting or blogs its a part of marketing.I do agree that commenting on blogs is a good way to build relationship with the blog owner as well as interacting with the readers.
thanks a lot
Hey, I’m the last commenter! (at least for now)This makes me less annoying, right?
Before i try any software, I usually read few reviews, and yours is so valuable. I’m convinced to try this.
Many thanks.
I had just learned about comment/keyword luv to help with back links. I’ll check out comment sniper software…automation always helps. I tried Neil Shearing’s free software but it did not seem to work as presented.
Thanks for the tip and the funny post!
Greg
Ive never used any blog commenter program but id assume you have to be careful with them, not to end up spamming blogs because that could end up getting you listed.