A lot of people write about the benefits of niche blogging, namely the ease with which you can get a site to rank in Google for niche terms, and the financial benefits of good Adsense clicks and affiliate sales opportunities.
A problem few seem to address is how to get good back-links for a niche blog.
The problem with getting back-links for niche sites is that it is hard to find other relevant sites to get links from.
If you are doing niche properly, then by default there will be very few specialized sites like yours out there, and finding them can be problematic.
If you do blog searches on Technorati for example, you will find hundreds of spam sites, but very few of value. This is because search engine spammers use automated blogs to hit huge lists of long-tail keywords.
If you search Google then you will mostly find old static sites, but your chances of getting links from those sites is almost zero. If you refine your Google search to look for specific blogging platforms you will find what you are looking for, but you will need to develop specialized searches for each blogging platform, and going through the results list is time consuming.
There are Firefox plugins and other cheap software tools you can use to make life easier, but even with these products finding the right sites can be a slow process.
However, as I have been fortunate enough to be given a copy for the forthcoming release of Comment Hut to evaluate I now have a solution to this probem 
Comment hut will search for blogs on WordPress, Live Journal, Drupal and Type Pad, as well as two additional platforms that have not been formally announced yet 
You can search one or all of these platforms for your niche terms.
Furthermore, Comment Hut will ONLY return URL’s with ‘commentability’, i.e. only blogs on which comments are enabled.
It also allows you to set the minimum PR (Page Rank) of sites to be returned, so, if you only want to look for PR 3+ sites, it will do that for you.
The fact that it allows filtering by PR in itself acts as a spam filter, as spam sites almost invariably have no PR.
Once you have your list of URL’s you can export it to file, or just click the links in the page. There are a couple of export options, (Exel or HTML), again allowing you to click the list to open URL’s.
You can then order the list by PR to prioritize the sites you want to target, then go off and start commenting.
You can just leave link bait if thats how you want to play it. Personally I prefer to take the time to build collaborative relationships with other bloggers, working with them to mutually boost our SERPS on a given phrase.
The only things that seem to be missing from Comment Hut are the ability to search the mySpace and Blogger platforms. Though there are two new platforms available in the forthcoming release, mySpace and Blogger are not among them. That said, with the number of results it does bring back, you will have plenty to be getting on with!
As a little test I thought I would do a search on “fear of flying” as Mitch at harpzon.com is doing a case study on a site in that niche.
Above you can see some of the wordpress URL’s returned by comment hut along with their PR. In total I was able to find 118 PR3+ links containing the search term “fear of flying”. I have been through the lists and found a number of sites which are directly discussing fear of flying (as opposed to mentioning it in passing) that would make the best sources of backlinks. If you want you can check the list here.
The current price of Comment Hut is $97 which seems a little expensive, however, with products like this you have to remember that economies of scale are not working in your favor!
You can get the demo version of Comment Hut free, which will search wordpress blogs only, and return just 10% of the results… this gives you an idea of what it can do, but is in no way representative of the results the full version delivers…. there is a huge difference between the demo and full versions.
Also, to get the free version you have to supply a mail address… if you do this be aware that these guys do run mail campaigns and you will get periodic mail shots from them.
So, is it worth $97? Well if you are serious about niches then my honest opinion is yes it is.
I am no stranger to advanced Google searches, even so, this product is a real time saver and helps hook you up with others in your niche very quickly.
Whether you get your $97 back is down to how well you select your niches in the first place, and how many sites you build!!
I have no doubt that I will squeeze $97 back out of this software pretty quickly (I reviewed this software for a reason 
).
If you have any further questions about Comment Hut both Paul and Stewart are very approachable guys and are contactable via their site.
For the record there are no affiliate links in this page, and after getting my grubby paws on the evaluation copy I was free to say whatever I wanted about it….
