There are a number of ways that you can drive extra traffic to your blog, some simple promotion methods combined with slightly more advanced methods can have a great effect on traffic levels.

But first you need to realise that you want targeted traffic to visit your blog. I'm telling you this so that you don't go down the route of getting untargeted traffic by using techniques such as traffic exchanges or buying traffic. These techniques are useful in certain circumstances but not for driving traffic to your blog. So I'd recommend staying away from these promotion methods here.

First the basics...

Add the URL of your blog to the signature of your emails, add it to your signature of forums you belong to. Email all your friends and tell them about your brand new blog and ask them to pass the email on to their friends who may also be interested in taking a look at your blog.

These are very simple but effective techniques that are often over looked.

Submit an Article...

A very effective method of promoting your blog can be to write an article related to the topic of it and submitting to one of the popular article submission websites. You do not need to be a fantastic writer to do this, there are thousands of people who use this method and the majority of them are not professional writers.

Ideally you want to write an article of around 400 - 500 words so that it won't be rejected by the article submission website. Each one will have their own rules but in general an article of this length will be fine.

Personally I use Ezinearticles to submit my articles to. I use them because the user interface is simple, they have a good reputation and they are also favoured by Google. This is a big advantage because it means that your article itself can rank highly in the Google results pages so it can receive good levels of traffic. Then some of that traffic will click through to your blog via a link you can place at the end of your article.

Submit a News Story to Netscape...

If your blog has some good news stories that you wish to inform people about then it is a good idea to register with Netscape who allow you to submit news stories which contain a link back to your blog.

Netscape is a very big website with high levels of traffic so you can receive good levels of traffic from them. But be aware that you can only submit a URL once so if you wish to submit multiple stories over time, then you will need to create a new page on your blog so that you have a new URL to submit.