Okay you may not have heard about the Boaty McBoatFace story but you can find out all about it with one quick search online. Basically, an agency in the UK opened up the naming of a boat to the general public.  Yep, you guessed it, the leading name chosen by the public was Boaty McBoatface.

Experiment Time

I felt that this was interesting breaking news (very funny) and thought that I would run an experiment with this. I wanted to test to see if blog comment posting could really drive some traffic to a new website. 
 
Step 1.

I purchased boatymcboatface.ca (the .com was already taken) and I built a quick mobile ready responsive website with some content on the story and a means for people to name things through a comments section.  I wired up all the analytics to the site so I could see the impact of the experiment.

Step 2.

I found newspaper and media websites in the UK, US and Canada where the story was published and where comments were accepted on stories.  I then posted some comments using my Wise Crescent Inc facebook account.  The posts mostly resembled the following which was posted on theguardian.com:
(you will see it was also bumped up twice, nice!)

Step 3.

I sat back and watched the stats roll in.  With google you can watch real-time hits which is not very practical for most sites but fun at the time.

Experiment Findings

Well this NEW site produced some decent numbers within the first few days. As expected as the story dies the site visits also declines but remember I really didn't work this like I would a full on blog posting strategy.

That is just over 271 sessions in a few days and 253 unique users! Imagine traffic spikes like this for your business site and if you worked the full strategy you could turn the spikes into sustained audience growth.

The following indicates specifically that some of the traffic came directly from the posts which I made at the newspaper and media sites. The source column is the website where the traffic came from and the sessions column indicates how much traffic was sent.

It turned out we also picked up some search traffic very quickly with this strategy.  This doesn't always happen with new sites.  You will see the keywords which were searched for in Google and the sessions column shows the number of sessions which visited the site.

Warning

BE WARNED, there are lots of spammers blog commenting as a bad SEO and scam tactic which is not the approach you want to take with blog comment posting.  The following comment post was found on a National Post article titled: "Ashley Csanady: Policing Ghomeshi’s lawyer’s feminism serves only to undermine feminism’s true aim".  You can see it doesn't fit the topic of the article.

CONCLUSION

You can do this for your website as well to drive traffic to you. Blog comment posting isn't a new strategy but it can be effective if done correctly.  The key is that you genuinely want to add to the online conversation with your comment post and with a link to something which may also interest the group.

You have to find and read the articles which are close to what you are trying to achieve with your business and get involved in the conversation.  Even if it is to say, "Hey nice post, I like the part where you...". 

You can do this, happy blog comment posting!