How to Drive Traffic To a New Blog Through a Commenting Tribe
I am always happy to oblige my audience, so in this post I’ll talk about how I created a commenting tribe to give my blog social proof as well as a push in initial traffic.I am sure you’ve heard of different internet “tribes” popping up as mushrooms after a summer rain.
What is a tribe?
Very simply, it’s a group of people who get together to promote each others’ content online.
I’ve seen 3 different tribe structures:
1. Traffic Exchange Type Tribes
Some of the tribes I know of are huge and can cost you up to $70 per month.
They use a very intricate point keeping system and remind me of traffic exchanges: the more points you accumulate by commenting on and sharing other tribers’ blogs, the more people will do the same for you.
My thought on this?
Keep your money.
2. Smaller Facebook Tribes
This is how this type of a tribe works: someone decides to create a fan page and call it a “tribe”.
Every new fan of the page can post links to promote their blogs – very simple concept.
It’s based on “give a little, take a little” kind of mentality; the hope is that the fans will not only post their own links, but also visit other fans’ blogs.
Problem with that: everyone focuses on self-promotion and the fan page creator is the only one who tries to visit other blogs – in the beginning anyway, until he/she figures out how futile the effort is and just let the page go.
I wouldn’t hope to get much traffic from those types of tribes, but I still do use them.
Why?
1. For social proof. When a reader sees that your post has already been shared by someone on Facebook, they are more likely to share it as well. Nobody wants to be the first one!
2. For backlinks. This is the easiest way to start your one way link building to a new post.
How do you find those tribes on Facebook?
Just type your main keyword and the word “tribe” in a search box.
3. Private Commenting Tribe
This is exactly the type of tribe marketing I created on Facebook and that helped my blog to become a success just about overnight – THANKS to my incredible tribe members.
Here is exactly what I did:
1. Create a private Facebook group.
2. Find peer blogs in your niche that provide good content, but don’t get much traffic yet. Take a look at their Alexa rank, see how many comments they get.
I wouldn’t recommend going for entirely new blogs, since commenting on a blog no one else knows about won’t bring you much traffic.
3. Contact the blog owner and let them know about your group; see if they are interested in joining.
4. You have to have a idea of how you want to run your tribe: how many people you need (20 was a good number for me), how many times per week each tribe member will visit other tribers’ blogs (in my group, we do 3 campaigns per week), what the rules are, etc.
5. And you are all set to go!
How I Run My Tribe
As I mentioned before, I decided to go for 3 “campaigns” per week.
I use “discussions” section to post a new campaign.
A campaign lasts 2 days.
Each tribe member who chooses to post a request for comments during a specific campaign has to also comment on all other requests.
Since the group is relatively small, it’s easy to keep members accountable.
How My Tribe Helped Me
1. It gave my blog social proof.
There’s nothing worse than visiting a blog with no action going on. Makes me want to leave right away. After all, if there are no signs of other people reading the blog, the content must be pretty bad!
That’s, unfortunately, how most people think.
Now imagine each of your posts has 5-10 comments as soon as it’s published! Quite a difference.
2. As I commented on my members’ blogs, I got noticed by their readers. I started getting traffic from their blogs.
3. My tribers also started sharing my content on their social networks. I started getting even more traffic from that.
It made a HUGE difference to my blog and all other blogs in the tribe.
We learned from each other, we pointed out the things that could be better on our blogs, we developed true friendships. Priceless!
Where Is My Tribe Now?
Update as of 10/20/2011:
We had a great run, but as of right now, my tribe’s time is over.
I do have an alternative though, if you are looking for an active tribe to join: my friend Dev Sharma of Technshare.com and Blokube.com has recently started his own tribe on Blokube.com.
I highly recommend you check it out.
