Top 10 Tips For Building Traffic to Your Blog

Unless you prefer to keep your blog private, you're probably blogging in hopes of reaching people. Bloggers who are just starting out may find that it takes time to get the word out. Promoting a blog isn't for the shy. If you want to bring in the masses, you're going to have perform a little shameless self promotion. What follows are some tips for alerting the world to your blog.

1. Content is King

First and foremost, you can encourage millions of people to visit your blog, but the numbers won't mean squat if you don't keep them coming back for more. You'll need to provide useful content. It's not enough to provide the same news as every other blogger in your niche topic. You'll have to come up with something new and unique and provide thought provoking analysis. Your blog has to say something and say it well.

2. Participate in Like-Minded Forums

Even if you're not a joiner, it pays to visit forums so the rest of the people in your niche group know about your blog. If your blog is about knitting, visit some knitting and craft forums. If your blog is about earthworms, visit earthworm, soil and gardening forums. You don't have to post a lot of "hey come visit my blog" type comments, but if you add a link to your blog in your signature, it will appear in every post. This is sure to bring in traffic.

3. Visit Other Blogs

Search for other blogs falling within your niche and pay them a visit. Be sure to comment so they'll visit your blog too. If you have something interesting to say about your topic, others may link to and even discuss your blog.

4. Add Tags

Don't forget your tags! Not only do tags help search engines pick up your blog, but they also help to direct those who are searching for your topic. Make sure you add as many tags as necessary. For instance, if your blog post is about roses, you'll want to add tags for roses, flowers, gardening, soil, planting, thorns, aphids, and other related keywords.

5. Add Links

Not only is it important to add relevant blog links to your blogroll, but you'll also want to link to other blogs in the text. The blogger on the other end of the link might just reciprocate, leading more traffic to your blog. At the very least, he'll add a reciprocating link to the side of his blog.

6. Technorati is Your Friend

By claiming a blog with the blog search engine Technorati, you're making it available to others who might not have otherwise heard of you. The more you post and the higher you are ranked, the more likely others are to turn up your blog during a search. Your Technorati rank depends on how many others link to your blog. If you want other bloggers to offer up links to you, you have to provide good content, an eye pleasing template and build up an active community.

7. Submit Your Site

In addition to submitting your site to all of the blog search engines, you will need to ping all the engines every time you update. To do so, utilize a free service such as Pingoat or Ping-O-Matic to ping all in one fell swoop.

8. Install an RSS Button

Make it easy for others to subscribe to your blog by installing an RSS button.

9. Read Up on the Latest Traffic Building Techniques

If you're really serious about blogging, visit blogs about blogs. The top blog bloggers offer great traffic building tips in addition to other helpful information.

10. Analyze Your Stats

In addition to the above steps, you'll want to implement a stat tracking service such as Site Meter to keep track of hits and traffic. Your stat tracker will not only let you know how many people are stopping by each day, but they'll also let you know where everyone is coming from. This will enable you to determine which traffic boosting methods work best for you. It takes time to build up traffic. Above all else, don't give up. It may take up to a year or more for yours to become one of the top blogs in your niche.