Exposure is the main ingredient in many advertising campaigns, especially the viral kind. Viral marketing usually does not follow the concept of blatant promotional tactics, but it does recognize the fact that exposure is integral to the process.
One way of viral marketing online involves leaving comments on blogs and messages in guest books. Before we go through with discussing this marketing scheme, let us just also point out that successful viral marketing makes you pause and consider, like a fascinating creature in your path and does not get swatted aside like a pesky fly. It is important for you to remember that viral marketing creates interest and does not get deleted as spam.
The thing you have to remember about viral marketing is that it can be hit or miss. Even if this is the case, working with a strategy is always advantageous. Randomly scattering links to your website on the internet may be a haphazard way of doing it, but it can turn out to be a fluke and actually work. This is not going to happen every time though. If you want the odds to be in your favor, have a game plan.
Before the advent of the rel=“nofollow” attribute, which hinders a hyperlink from getting any credit in search engine ranking, commenting on blogs was a reasonably effective way of scattering links. Nowadays, your efforts may just be in vain. If search engines do not acknowledge links with the rel=”nofollow” attribute, why bother to take up commenting as a tool for marketing?
For starters, let us try to understand this attribute better. The rel=”nofollow” feature is interpreted differently by different search engines. Mostly, the link remains clickable and it will bring you to the given address, but its mere presence will not do anything for your ranking. However, there are search engines that literally interpret the rel=”nofollow” attribute by not following the link, while others simply do not score the link for ranking.
This attribute has received some flak because it is not an effective tool for discouraging spammers. What it has, in fact, discouraged is the willingness of professionals to give informational comments in aid of boosting their PageRank reputation. Also, Google, the one that strongly advocates the use of rel=”nofollow”, is being viewed as spiteful for wanting to deter the weight of inter-blog linking in site rankings.
If you must take this point into consideration, note that not all sites use this attribute. Having put that out of the way, let us discuss how we can actively promote websites by leaving comments in blogs or guest books.