Whether you are blogging for business or for pleasure, you will most likely want to get traffic to your blog. Getting traffic to your blog is much easier than you think.
It is also easier than getting traffic to a traditional website. The blogosphere is really one big conjoined family, and a lot of your traffic will come from the blogosphere.
First, use the ping and Trackback features. Each and every time you update your blog, you need to ping the blog search engines so that they are aware that you have updated.
Use Trackbacks often. Visit other people’s related blogs, refer to their posts on your own blog, and provide a Trackback link.
By pinging the blog search engines, you will get blogosphere traffic and search engine traffic. By using Trackbacks, you will get blogosphere traffic from the blogs that you are tracking back to.
This is the fastest way to build a readership for your blog, but there are other ways to promote your blog as well.
If you are running a business blog, you might want to use pay-per-click advertising. You will also want to put a link to your blog on your main website, on each and every page, write and submit articles, and include a link to your blog in your signature file that you use in email and on forums and newsgroups.
Once you get traffic, you want to keep them coming back. Allow RSS for your blog, so that people can add it to their feed readers.
Also make sure that your posts are intelligent and well written, as well as interesting and useful. Make sure that you are blogging regularly daily if possible, once a week at the very least.
Even though you will be pinging, use Search Engine Optimization techniques as well. You can take a course on SEO on the Internet to learn more about this, but essentially, you want to include your keywords in the body of your posts and in the titles of your posts as well.
Visit other blogs and leave comments, using your signature file that contains a link to your blog. Make sure that you are leaving relevant comments do not become a comment spammer!
Leaving comments is different than using Trackbacks on your blog. This is also something to do when you want to Trackback to a blog that doesn’t have Trackbacks enabled you can leave a comment instead.
Submit your blog URL to the major search engines, the blog directories, and the RSS directories. You can find a very healthy list of RSS directories and blog directories at http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm.
Also, visit Search Engine Watch at http://www.searchenginewatch.com for a listing of specialized search engines that may relate closely to your topic, and get listed in those search engines as well.
You will learn even more advanced traffic building techniques as you go along, but for now, if you do these things, you will find that you have a healthy blog readership in a relatively short amount of time.
