Attracting traffic through comments

Most of the initial traffic to my blog came from the sites I've commented on, it was very surprising to see that some of the comments I made on sites like Problogger, DailyBlogTips and Shoemoney drove upto 30 visitors each in just 24 hours and that time this was a very high traffic for me and made up to 90% of my total blog traffic. This was when i started to realize the power of comments, i truly couldn't believe my eyes when a comment on DailyBlog tips drove 104 visitors in 1 day, you can see it here (I've written the second comment).

I slowly began to realize something different I had done in the particular post, i started experimenting with different comments and I decided to right this post and also try to get your views on it. That particular comment drove 104 visitors, my total traffic per day was 150 visitors, most of them stayed for 2 minutes and performed up to 5 actions in average.

In this post I've tried to combine all the techniques I've used to optimize my comments of full traffic benefits,

Grabing Attention
Be resourceful
Simple comments such as 'Hey great post' will never gain attention and you will get only one or two clicks, your goal should be to get as much attention as possible, and this is done by being as much resourceful as possible, try to give information or ask questions to the blogger and other readers.

Disagree with the blogger

Another way to gain attention, if you see my comment in that link you'll notice that I have disagreed with Daniel and this helped me grab attention of many of his readers and even him. He too replied to my comment, which I was feeling really proud about.

Add humor 

This is something I constantly do and it also gets me a lot of replies, I usually make fun of the blogger by making some small minor joke which doesn't hurt anyone. This can definitely gain replies from others too.

Getting traffic
Optimizing for clicks
Every blog allows you to post a link in your name, but its not always seen as you have to get your blog's name seen. You can do this by giving a your blogs link separately below your comment, if that blog allows that. Another way to get your link seen is by posting a link related to the content and encouraging readers to visit the link.

Be on the top
Its really important to be on the top, its advisable to stay top 5, i have managed to figure out the usual time of posting for bloggers in my niche, I visit those sites during that time and most of the time I'm top five. This is because blogs like Problogger would get over 100 comments within 12 hours and its really difficult to gain traffic by commenting in the end.

Building an audience
Design, speed and content
Many times, people who visit my blog from the comments I have made, usually leave within seconds, this was because earlier my blog had a very bad design and was also really slow, so most of the traffic I got from commenting went wane as only a few visited me again.

Choose a few good blogs 
My advise is to choose a few good blogs and be as active as possible. If you comment on many blogs and are not active on any of them, you will fail to create an audience for your site. I kept commenting on every article on Problogger from the past 3 months and that is why I've got a great audience there.

Get active and reply to others 
Putting up one comment on the top isn't enough to gain exposure, be with the post and reply to some comments you find interesting, I used to 5 comments on each post in DailyBlogTips when i started. Make sure your replies are interesting and do not forget give a link below.

Use the same avatar and name
When your getting active on a particular blog it is important to keep the same avatar and name on every post so that the constant readers of that blog can recognize you, and may click to see your latest post. Not only this, it has a lot of long term benefits.