25 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Blog

25 Ways to Get More Traffic to your Blog

As you start to develop your blog, you will come to realize an important fact: you want people to read this thing. In order to gain more readers, you need to actively drive more traffic to your blog on a regular basis. There are many, many different ways that you can do this. Here are 25 of them just to get you started:

1. Tell people about it. Word of mouth is the best marketing tool that you have at your disposal so don't be afraid to brag about your blog every chance that you get.

2. Link to your own articles. You can do this within your blog, of course. But also make sure that you are using links to your own work if you do any sort of blog writing for other people. (Of course, make sure that you're allowed to do this.)

3. Use Craigslist. There are dozens of different ways that you can use Craigslist to promote your blog and you should be using every single one of them.

4. Get active on social bookmarking sites. Top ones that I would recommend as a blogger are Mixx and StumbleUpon but there are lots of big and small ones out there to keep you busy. The key here is to choose just a few and then be truly active on them on a regular basis. This gives you more credibility on the site and drives more traffic to your blog.

5. Visit the blogs of other people who write on similar topics and leave thoughtful comments there. Include your blog link in the "website" section of the comment form and people will start turning up on your blog.

6. Add a link to the blog on all of your social networking profiles. If you're on Facebook or LinkedIn, you should make sure people can find your blog there.

7. Add a link to the blog on your email signature. Also add a link to a specific post that you like.

8. Business cards. Every blogger should have business cards and should hand them out liberally. Very few do.

9. Issue a press release. Figure out what makes your blog special and then issue a press release about it. If you're really serious, you might hire someone to write and spread the press release for you.

10. Do a giveaway. You can advertise on the blogs of others that you're doing a giveaway on your own blog. For example, you have CDs laying around that you don't want so hold a contest and announce it on a bunch of music blogs.

11. Give away your writing. Do guest blogging on the sites of others. Offer to write one article per month for a site that you like in exchange for a link. Alternatively, you can publish articles on sites like this one which may provide you revenue income but which are also a tool for promoting your own blog.

12. Have a link love post each week. These are posts that many bloggers are doing these days which are simply lists of some of the other posts that they are reading around the web. People like this because it's a great resource for them to start learning about other blogs with similar topics. And you get the immediate attention of the people that you are linking to.

13. Use promotional items. Bloggers need to learn some of the basic marketing skills that salespeople use. Get pens or coffee mugs or whatever else you'd like to give away and have them imprinted with your blog URL. Try to come up with a cute saying or slogan that says what your blog is about to go along with it. Then give them away like crazy.

14. Create a newsletter. You can probably find the time to do a short little monthly newsletter about yourself. Include information about your blog and your favorite posts as well as some of your goals for the next month. Send this out as an e-newsletter or a print newsletter to everyone on your contact list. This will help them feel closer to you personally and that's sure to make them more loyal to your blog.

15. Tell Technorati that you're around. You should sign up with Technorati and then make use of Technorati tags in your posts.

16. Understand Google. Google is the search engine that everyone is using these days so you should make sure that you understand how it works. There are lots of articles out there that you can read to get a better understand of keyword use, linking rules and page rank.

17. Submit your blog to directories. Here is a list of 100 of them to get you started.

18. Add a link to the blog on your bio. There are many different places where you will publish your bio over the years. Make sure that you include that link so people from all of those places can find your blog.

19. Linkbaiting. There are many aspects of this but the basic idea of link baiting is that you write a controversial topic and then include links in it to people that are likely to disagree with you. You have to be able to stand the heat if you're going to do this but controversy is always a great way to get attention and attention is what you want.

20. Write an eBook. If you know enough to blog about a topic then you know enough to write an eBook. It will take a little bit of time but then you can promote it through different channels where you can't promote a blog. Include your link on all of that promotional material and people will turn up on your blog.

21. Make sure that you are regularly reading up about new blog promotion tools and resources for bloggers. Here's a link to 10,000 resources for writers and bloggers, many of which will help you out.

22. Create a video about your topic. You can film a short video that explains an aspect of your blog topic and upload it to YouTube. Humorous videos are best because people like them. Make sure that you include your blog URL on the video as well as on your YouTube profile.

23. Attend blogging events. There are social media and blogging conferences cropping up all over the place these days. Other bloggers are your best readers so start getting out there and meeting them.

24. Hold your own event for bloggers. Start advertising in your area that you're putting together a coffee-and-conversation night for bloggers to talk about blogging. The more people that attend, the more traffic you're going to get.

25. Provide content that people want to talk about. Ultimately, traffic really does spread through word of mouth. If you have good content then people will start helping you to spread the word.

These are all great ways to start driving traffic to your blog. However, the best way is to get creative and do some sort of blog promotion that no one else is doing yet. Anything that gets you attention is going to get you traffic.