1. Social Networking
This really helped me a great deal in the early days of my blog and I must tell you, the first handful of visitors I got was from Facebook. I use twitter a lot less though but it can also be a great source of traffic if properly used. You can’t separate blog traffic from social networking and I think you need to add people with similar interests as friends who would read and appreciate your ideas each time you share link to your new blog post. Also you should have a fully function fan page. You can get free facebook fans in several ways – inviting your friends, showing the badge on your blog and so on.
2. Web Forums
This is used less by bloggers but if you’re new to blogging, you definitely need it. Using popular web forums is one of the quickest and most effective ways to drive traffic to your blog. You should register in two or three popular web forums and be active there. Post interesting topics in those forums and use your blog as reference once in a while but do not spam. Imagine the traffic you’ll be driving to your blog with a topic that gets up to 1,000 page views in just a day. You should also include your site link in your forum signature as people will definitely check your site when they find your forum post interesting. I got quite some traffic from Nairaland forum and some other international forums when I started out.
3. Blogging Communities
Blogcatalog was the bomb back in 2009, it was a major source of traffic for me back then because I was very active there. I’m not sure it still works like it used to but there are other blogging communites you can join to drive traffic to your blog. You can join linkreferral, yousaytoo, technorati and some other blogging communities. I used them a lot less these days but you can google out the best of them or ask around.
4. Guest Blogging
You’re a new blogger so don’t expect your guest post to be accepted on problogger.net but you can still find a popular blog to write for. Writing for a well known blog is a way of exposing your blog which stands to get lots of real traffic if your guest post suddenly goes viral. I normally check out guest authors’ sites each time I read piece of their writing on other blogs.
5. Blog Directories
I don’t believe in directories that much but you can still drive a handful of traffic to your blog from there. Submitting your blog to directories doesn’t only get you some traffic, it’s also a way of building your backlinks which is pertinent to search engine ranking.
6. Commenting on Popular Blogs
Being a regular commentator on popular blogs can drive one or two people to your blog daily and increase your popularity in the process but this is not the major reason I included it, I included it because it’s a way of building your backlinks also just like the blog directory thing I mentioned earlier.
7. Submitting Articles to Directories
Trust me, you can get thousands of people trooping in to your site by just writing a couple of articles and submitting them to ezine, scribd and the rest of them. More often than not, articles from these directories do come up in search results when properly written. Including your site in the byline and referring to one or two of your blog posts is an ideal way to drive traffic to your blog and some people might even be kind enough to include those backlinks when they use your articles on their blogs.
8. Social Bookmarking
I haven’t been using them much lately but a fellow blogger I know personally wrote a post on the power of stumbleupon and digg, making me realize I’ve been missing out alternative ways to increase my blog’s traffic.
9. Optimize your Blog for Google Search
This is probably the most important of all. Google is the biggest source of traffic in the world for any site and this is a fact. Submit your site to major search engines including google, bing, yahoo and the rest of them. Also, be sure your link building and other search engine optimization techniques are properly implemented. You will even find other sources of traffic negligible when google finally starts driving real visitors to your blog. Optimizing your site for search engine is a long time process though, but it definitely pays at the long run as you will be increasing your alexa traffic rank and google page rank at the same time.
10. Read Like Crazy
Yes, you heard me right, read like crazy. I know you’re probably a good reader by reading through this boring piece right till the end but you need to read more like it. Get different ideas from probloggers, read every ebook on blogging you can lay your hands on, subscribe to newsletters based on blogging tips, driving traffic effectively to your blog and SEO.
