Are you someone that enjoys blogging but wonders how you can start building traffic? These tips should help you. All of them are free.
First you need to have several quality articles before you begin to market it. If people come to your blog and there is very little content you might not get them back. Whatever your blog topic is, write enough articles that will capture the interest and attention of the readers you are targeting. If your reader sees a benefit from reading your blog, they are much more likely to subscribe or come back to your blog again.
Also I would have a recent picture of yourself and an introduction with your contact information easy to find, along with a more extended profile people can click on to learn more about you. Make it as easy as you can for people to contact you. By having your picture and profile on your blog it allows people to get to know you on a more personal level.
One of the first things you can do is start to leave comments on other people's blogs. I would only do it for blogs that are about the same or a similar topic to yours. So if you blog about cats you can look for other blogs related to cats or pets. You can find other blogs easily by doing a google search. Just type in "cat blogs" or whatever your subject is. Be sure to leave good comments and ones that contribute to the discussion you are making remarks about, then you can have a link back to your blog.
You can do this with as many blogs as you wish as often as you like to start building traffic.
If you aren't already a member of online discussion forums, search google and join ones that match your interests. As blogging is so popular now some forums have folders specifically for blogs and you may be able to share your blog there with others and do link exchanges. Be sure to read the rules for each specific forum.
Forums that allow link exchanges and posting your blog will certainly increase your traffic. This is especially good for new bloggers. You can build up relationships with them and if they are relatively new to blogging also you are helping each other out. Again it is best to focus on helping other bloggers who have blogs with a similar topic to yours.
Forums usually allow you to have a signature line after your posts. Contribute to the discussions by adding good content or helpful suggestions and you can have many people clicking on your link.
Once you have several good articles you can "ping" them. Pinging is a service that automatically lets many services know your blog has new content and these services will crawl and index your site. This should be done each time you add new content to your blog. Pingoat and ping-o-matic are widely used.
You also want to submit your blog to as many social bookmarking sites as you can. One of the best I have found is Social Poster. This will submit your blog to some of the largest sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Stumble Upon, among many others. It will take time to join each of these sites but well worth the time and effort. Once you have joined as many as you wish the submission is quite fast and easy.
Another method you can use is blog carnivals. These are blog events that focus on particular topics.
One way this works is that a blogger will write details about what topic they wish to have for a carnival, and invite others to submit their own articles for submission to the carnival, which will be like an online magazine. The carnival will have a title, specific topic, links to all the contributions that have been received and often opinions and remarks on the articles.
The most important thing is to be consistent. When you are first starting your blog you should post every single day, for at least the first while. After that you can write a bit less often, but I recommend no less than 3 or 4 times a week, and use the submission services mentioned above each time you have new content.
