I don't know how some web companies, like Twitter, make their money. They offer amazingly useful services while asking nothing in return. At least, nothing I can see. Maybe some of them are responsible for flooding my inbox with those third-party hair growth/hair removal spam letters, maybe a few run low-level spyware permitted by their mumbo-jumbo user policy. Maybe a few are just downright nice.

Comment Kahuna seems to fall in this last category. My AVG anti-virus program seems to like it. And the results... pure money, at least for the four times I've used it.

I used to post like I was writing a book: carefully, at length, with lots of photos and captions. And I would sit there steaming week after week as I checked my AdSense for any kind of compensation. To put it this way: Joel Comm talks about how he used to make $3.00 a day with his websites. To me, that would have been heaven. Then, thanks to Joel and ProBlogger.net, I learned a few tricks, and I finally broke free of those awful days. Granted, I wasn't making as much as I wanted, not by a long shot, but it was nice to be compensated for just about every article I wrote.

When I saw some banter on Twitter about Comment Kahuna, I jumped on it immediately and visited the site (CommentKahuna.com). The video was very friendly, inviting, and simple. But the application was powerful!

What Comment Kahuna does is let anyone with a blog (or website, for that matter) find quality keyword-matched blogs to post comments on. It also lets you filter out blogs marked with "no follow" tags, which neutralize the search engine value of comments posted there. Or, if you are looking to promote your blog regardless of "no follow" tags, you can include them in your search.

When you start using CK, you need to create one or more profiles, which correspond to the name-email-website-comment setups you see on a lot of blogs. This way you can create convenient profiles for your main blogs without having to hand-type them over and over again. You can even create a standard comment for your profiles, but if you use the same comment over and over again in every situation, you will likely have your comments deleted and may be permanently blocked by spam comment filtering software. Comment Kahuna recommends reading each post you comment on, so your comments will at least have value to the blog owners, and stay up.

Once you have a profile or two made up, all you do is put in the target page rank of the blogs you want, the number of blogs you want to comment on (10-50), a search type (CommentLuv, TypePad, Live Journal, Wordpress, Articlefeeder, or all of the above), and a keyword phrase. Again, you can also filter out "no follow" blogs. One important upgrade that CK has made is its inclusion of CommentLuv blogs, which capture your last blog entry and put it up with your comment. This is one of the best ways to draw back legitimate, interested traffic to your site.

Whatever the blog type, Comment Kahuna will pull up relevant blogs, and will have your comment profile appear to the left of the blog, in the control panel. If you want to pre-fill every field with your profile, you carn do that, or tailor your information to the blog at hand by typing it in. You can either skip a non-relevant blog, save your progress and stop, or go through blogs until you're done. When you're all set, you can save your posted results to your hard drive for later analysis.

From an ad revenue perspective, CK has been excellent. Every time I've used it, I've made advertising money over the next few days.

But CK's results are worth more than just the traffic they bring. Many of the websites I've visited have strategic value. Tonight, when I created a profile for promoting my hubs, I discovered a blog mentioning the emergence of SocialText as a supplement to Facebook and Twitter, and another site I found was one very good-looking web design company.

Comment Kahuna isn't for everyone. My friend Roxie tried downloading it and it tripped every computer alarm she had, and I heard about it all the way from England. In fact, my ears are still ringing and it hurts to sit down. But if you have a comfy old beater of a computer like mine, give it a try.

Lionel Houde blogs at http://virtualmerchants.blogspot.com. He is also a freelance blogger. Disclaimer: Not responsible for results of any downloads. Responsible for any money you make from reading this post. :D