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You know that commenting on blogs is a great way to extend your presence online, meet other bloggers, business owners, and potential customers, and ultimately drive more traffic to your own blog and website.

But what makes a good blog comment? How do you go about "joining the conversation," as multitudes of well-meaning people are constantly haranguing you to do? Is there a science to it? An established theorem of blog commenting best practices?  What's a business blogger to do?

Let's take a simple, mathematical approach to commenting on other people's blogs.

Add

Add something useful, new, or interesting to the conversation. Easier said than done, to be sure. But avoid leaving comments just for the sake of leaving comments, especially those that add nothing to the topic at hand.

Example: While everybody likes to be agreed with, try to go beyond a simple "I agree" in your comments. What exactly do you agree with? Was one of the points made by the blogger more persuasive than the others? Which arguments were less persuasive? 

Added benefit: Blog comments offer a great opportunity to show more of your human face to the readers in your space. A personal anecdote goes a long way in contributing something truly unique and valuable to the conversation that only you can add. Share something of yourself, your background, your expertise.

Subtract

Subtract any gratuitous self-promotion from your blog comments. If you have a truly relevant blog post on your own site, then by all means refer to it, but only after summarizing how and why it is relevant to the author's post. Avoid talking about your own products and services on other people's blogs. 

Example: If you sell accounting software, and the author of another blog writes about a tricky tax question that your software helps answer, try to answer the question in a simple, layman-friendly way and help the readers of this blog understand the issue better.

Added benefit:  You've just uncovered a blog post that is dying to be written on your own blog. Write in more detail on your own site about how to approach the tricky tax question, and link back to the article that sparked the idea for the post.

Multiply

Multiply the positive effect of your comments by referring (and linking, where appropriate) to the blogs, comments, and contributions of others.  Draw connections and parallels where others have not yet pointed them out. Promote the good work and insights of other commenters, and be specific about what it is you value about their contributions.

Example: If you sell signs and banners, visit the blogs of graphic designers and artists who design for the commercial sector. Talk about what you admire in their designs, and why these principles are important in business signs and marketing.

Added benefit: You might find some bloggers in a related space who might be interested in guest blogging for your site. Adding diverse voices to your blog increases the readability and potential audience for your blog by a surprising amount.

Divide

Divide your attention among blogs in a number of different spaces -- not just the one your own blog occupies.  What types of blogs do your customers enjoy, when they are not thinking fondly of you and your products and services?

Seek out a number of different worlds that might be of interest to your customers, your partners, your vendors, your friends. Visit these blogs as frequently as you do those in your own segment (if not more), and contribute thoughtful remarks to these conversations as well. Avoid confining yourself to your own little "echo chamber" by frequenting new and exciting different neighborhoods in the blogosphere.

Example: If you sell pools, and write a blog about pools and hot tubs, find some blogs that discuss outdoor home decorating, home gardening, lawn sports, and other related leisure activities.

Additional benefit: These sites might give you ideas for posts of your own: what kind of furniture do you need when you own a pool? What kind of food might you serve poolside this summer? What are some tips for keeping your skin safe from UV rays during the warmer months?

Add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It all adds up to a great business blog, and to creating a strong and helpful presence in the blogosphere that builds your brand's reputation, authority, and good will.

Post written by Beth Dunn, a member of the Inbound Marketing Consultant team at HubSpot. Beth also blogs at www.bethdunn.org and An Accomplished Young Lady.

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So you've been listening to your techie nephew talk about Twitter and Facebook. You understand the appeal from the social and networking perspectives -- but you're still stuck on one question: What, exactly, can social media do for your business?

If you look at our experience here at HubSpot, one answer is clear: leads.

The graph above represents leads generated on HubSpot.com from visitors who were originally referred to HubSpot via a social media platform like Twitter or Facebook between April 2008 and March 2010. The data is clear: Social media is a significant, growing lead generation channel.

This is by no means our biggest lead channel, but it's also nothing to sneeze at. Based on the leads alone, social media is worth the time we put into it.

Of course, in addition to leads at the top of our sales and marketing funnel, HubSpot gets other benefits from social media. Twitter and Facebook help us nurture prospects through a sale, they help us build relationships with and retain customers, they help us listen, they help us communicate internally, and much more.

How do we generate those leads? That's a separate blog post (or webinar!), but here's one secret: Social media only works as a lead generation tool when you share links to your own content on your own site. It's very hard to generate leads for your business on facebook.com or twitter.com. You have to give community members a reason (great content) to click through to your site.

One last thing: You're probably wondering what caused some of the higher-than-average months in the graph above. They're each months when we published a piece of content that was exceptionally popular on social media. For example, in July 2009 we published the Facebook for Business ebook, our most popular ever.

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Wondering how the rampant innovations in search and social media are impacting SEO best practices?  

HubSpot recently got input from Aaron Khalow of Online Marketing Summit on the evolution of SEO and what it means for SMBs.  To continue the conversation, we asked two more internet marketing luminaries to weigh in on the topic.

Sage Lewis of SageRock, a digital marketing agency, and Nathan Thompson of Marketing Experiments both agreed that as search gets more relevant through social media and real time results, and Page Rank is declining in importance as the metric of note.

Sage used multi-media to his advantage and answered our questions on the evolution of SEO via video.   Ultimately, he says that "If you optimize for the visitor, your site will naturally be optimized for search engines," emphasizing that a modern, ethical approach to content creation and optimization is key and is driving legitimacy in SEO.

Though Sage's agency perspective is similar, the Marketing Experiments approach is a little different.  In fact, Nathan is a marketer after my own heart and ties his responses back to ROI.

How have you seen SEO as a practice change over the last few years?

For better or worse, SEO efforts are becoming more sophisticated over time. Most SEO "best practices" have been so widely circulated that just having keywords in your copy and title tags isn't going to put you at the top of Google. At the same time, there is still a lot of bad information floating around, so getting the basics right is necessary just to play the game.

As more people have started to see the value of SEO, and invest more time and money into SEO, it has become increasingly important to take a testing approach to your SEO efforts. Understanding how, why and when your efforts affect your rankings is just as important as your rank itself. Some of this comes from research, but even more of it comes from watching those who rank above you and from your own experimentation.

Is search engine rank (page rank) important?  Why or Why not?

It's a question of ROI.

If you're happy with your current level of traffic, leads, traffic quality, etc. then rank probably doesn't matter much to you, unless it changes. If all of your high-converting traffic comes from affiliates or PPC advertising, then rank probably doesn't mean much to you. But if improving your rank is going to provide you an ROI based on increased leads, more qualified traffic, etc. then rank probably matters to you a lot. Saying you don't want to rank at the top spot for one of your primary keywords is like saying you don't care if you win the lottery. While you're probably ok without it, you'd probably be really ok with it, too.  The bigger question is, "when is it feasible, considering your time and resources, to focus on achieving one more spot, versus focusing on your optimization efforts to increase sales with the traffic you already have?" Like any other business decision, it comes down to priorities and ROI.

How do you think localization and personalization have changed the relevance of search ranks?

As someone using search engines to find information, localization and personalization provides me with results that are more relevant to me, making me a more motivated, more qualified lead when I click on results and arrive at a site. As a site owner this makes the traffic arriving from these results even more valuable to me. I think this has increased the relevance of search ranks and places even more importance on SEO efforts.

What will be the impact of social media inclusion in search?

I think the impact of social media inclusion in search is two-fold. On one hand it will help provide more useful, more up-to-date information to users. On the other hand, the fast-changing nature of social media is going to create a lot of noise to filter through. A lot of this impact will depend on how the search engines adapt and begin to incorporate "real-time" and "social media" search results.

The other factor will be how social media sites themselves continue to evolve and handle the growing amount of information contained within these sites. People don't want all information; they want the "right" information.

What is the most important thing an SMB can do to improve organic traffic?

Start with the end in mind. The goal is not to improve organic traffic; it's to get more customers, sales, subscriptions, etc. Choose your keywords wisely. Get the basics right. Build your site to be future-proof.

Your SEO efforts start with the coding of your site. They continue with the creation of your content. Create relevant information. Get a ton of relevant links. Measure your progress. Don't piss off Google.

How is your content strategy evolving to leverage social media channels and get the most relevant content to your audience?

Free Webinar-On-Demand: Social Media Optimization Is The New SEO With Brian Solis

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