How to get traffic to my blog

There is plenty of free material online about this subject, and that's good - because a quality blog that draws visitors is (in my opinion) the very best way to generate online sales and/or to build your email contact list (with TrafficWave, of course).

The first thing that you need to know about traffic to your blog is that it will start coming automatically once you begin adding content.  I'm serious.  After you have made even a few posts to your blog, you will begin to attract visitors via web searches.  The more content you add, the more page-depth and authority your site will have.  As long as you stay on topic and offer visitors quality, original content, the web traffic will eventually take care of itself.  However, to get a whole lot of traffic on a daily basis... you'll need to be more aggressive

For example, social bookmarking on sites like Digg or Delicious is very good, as is 'Tweeting' your posts.  This can be very labor intensive, however, especially if you have multiple blogs (as you should).  However, there are some software items out there that can automate a lot of this for you and create an integrated social marketing presence, driven by your blog (or blogs).  For example, there are ways to make every blog post show up in your Facebook profile.  At this point, I think it's important to tell you that I recommend keeping your personal and business Facebook accounts completely separate.  Do NOT mix Internet business contacts with your family and friends because you'll regret it if you do.

Of course, another excellent way to bring traffic to your blog is to leave comments on other people's blogs that relate to your subject matter.  Believe or not, people do read blog comments.  If you have something interesting to say on a popular blog, that author's readers will follow your link back to your blog in order to learn more.  Not only that, linking back to your site from someone else's creates something called a 'back-link'.  Google loves those.  The more relevant ones that you have, the more important the Google robots perceive your site to be.  But relevance is the key here.  If your blog is about email marketing, then only create back-links from other email marketing sites.  Understand?

The last thing to remember are 'keywords'.  Always tailor your blog posts titles (and the first sentence of your posts) to match what you imagine people might type into search engines.  The title of this post, 'How to get traffic to my blog' is a good example.  It works.

So, basically, what you want to do is add fresh, original content at least once a week (the more the better) and keep keywords and keyword phrases in mind.  Over time, this alone will get you plenty of traffic.  I also suggest that you have multiple blogs - again, the more the better.  But you want to create as many relevant links back to your site as possible.  Social bookmarking and commenting on other sites is the very best approach, in my opinion.