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The hardest part of producing a blog is not getting great mouth-watering content (although this is very important), the most important part of running a blog is actually driving traffic to your blog.
It has happened to almost all of us at some point in our life as a blogger. You have a fantastic layout, good readable content, but nobody is coming to read what you have to say.
There are things that you can do to help drive traffic to your blog. And I’m talking about the kind of traffic you want, not just generic traffic. I’m going to list a selection of ways that I have used at various times to increase my traffic to this and other blogs under my control.
1. Forums
This is something that a lot of people fail to make use of. When you join a forum you can normally put your link in your signature and this is displayed on every post you make.
Sign up to say twenty popular forums, make at least ten posts a day on each one and you will soon have a nice bit of traffic coming in as the other members will become intrigued by the link.
Don’t Spam, only leave posts that are relevant.
2. Email Signature
How many emails do you send out a day? Take a second to think about it, I send quite a lot and if you are part of newsgroups then chances are you’ll send even more than me.
Stick your link at the bottom of every email signature. When people reply to your newsgroup posts your link will be included every time. The same process happens if you send friends jokes, they forward them to their friends who forward them on to their friends, each one includes your link.
3. MSN, Yahoo, AOL Screen Name
I use MSN and Yahoo a lot of the time and I put my links in the screen name. This might not bring in a lot of traffic but your friends and contacts will see the link and more often than not curiosity will get the better of them, if they like it they might even send your other people.
4. Write Articles On Zine Sites
Spend maybe an hour writing some articles about your blog or a product you are selling. They do not have to be long, about 150 words should be just fine. Make sure you include keywords related to your blog or your product.
Post them on web sites like Goarticles.com or Ezinearticles.com. Do not forget to include links to your blog or product in the bio part of your profile, this is added to the end of your articles.
Not only do a lot of people visit these sites to read these articles but a ton of web sites and blogs copy and paste hundreds of these articles onto their sites every day so you’ll gain even more traffic through other sites.
5. Submit Your Posts To Social Bookmarking Sites
I must admit that I do not know too much about social bookmarking. Basically it is an option for you and your readers to submit posts you have done to websites who collect posts from other blogs and show them for other people to read.
Sound simple?
There are many plugins found on the WordPress Plugin site that can help by putting links under each post which you or your readers can click and submit in a couple of seconds. Sociable is possibly the best one.
6. Twitter, Facebook & Myspace Oh My!
One way to gain a lot of traffic is to set up accounts with social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, Twitter, etc and place links to your blog and any products you are selling.
I have two Twitter accounts and each one promotes a blog each and the traffic I receive from Twitter, and their related sites, is the number two traffic incomer for me just behind Google.
7. Write a Press Release
Once a month or so write a press release about your blog or your product and publish it on web sites such as PRweb.com.
Again it might not seem like a good idea to you, but a lot of sites and blogs copy and paste the press releases from these websites and put them on their own sites and blogs.
8. Blog Commenting
This is not a very popular method among bloggers, but it is something that can bring in not just a nice amount of traffic, but if you do it well enough it can also help you increase your Page Rank with Google.
Basically you visit other blogs that are of a similar niche to yours and leave comments on their posts. Most blogs give you the opportunity of leaving your URL link. I know I have found some great blogs by being bored and clicking on random comment URL links before.
Please note that you should always leave comments that are relevant to the post content and do not look 100% like they are there to gain a link back. Most blog authors will remove them anyway, wasting both your time and theirs.
