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Often, bloggers come to a point in their blogging careers (usually early on) where they sit back and take a serious look at what kind of traffic numbers they are pulling in on a daily basis. A lot of times, rookie bloggers (those that have been blogging for less than six months) get discouraged when they find out through the use of stats tracking programs that they aren’t getting the kind of traffic that they feel they deserve. They may even have some great, “pillar” type articles and regular content updates but are left wondering where everyone is at!

Why aren’t people coming to your blog like they should be?

What I’m about to tell you will answer that question. Whether you’re brand new out of the gate to blogging, or even if you’ve been around for a little while – I want to go over some very basic, but highly effective ways to drive quick traffic to your blog to get that little “spark” that you need to really set the traffic on fire!

1.Take advantage of Social Bookmarking sites. This method alone could provide the boost that you need to grab some loyal readers and subscribers for life. I’m assuming that as a blogger you know what I mean when I talk about Social Bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Netscape, Slashdot…etc). These sites are basically lists of internet resources that users find useful/helpful/funny which are free and available to the general public. These sites are where you want your “all-star” articles to be bookmarked and you can accomplish this a couple different ways. The easiest way, obviously, is for you to submit them yourself. This is a matter of clicking a few buttons and sending them in. Same goes for the second way – a lot of times your readers will submit the articles for you, which is also fine and dandy. Now assuming your article is a great one that provides value to someone who reads it, then you’d better hope your hosting company can handle some major bandwidth usage because it’s not unusual to get hundreds or even thousands of hits in the matter of a few hours. Again, that’s assuming that your article is fantastic, which leads me to my next point. Don’t overdo it on submitting to these Social Bookmarking sites! Only submit those articles that you would consider your best work. The last thing you want to do is spam these sites – because eventually people will notice the spammage and won’t “vote” or “tag” your articles anymore. Trust me though, if you submit a hot article at the right time (afternoon time is usually best), your traffic will literally double, triple or even more in a very short period of time.

2. Comment, comment, comment! A highly effective way of driving quick traffic to your blog is to start getting involved in other blogger’s discussions and comments. By now, I’m sure you’ve picked a niche to write about and are probably familiar with the “power-houses” or “A-listers” in your field of expertise. What you want to do is make a list of the blogs that are related to yours that have active discussions, and hop right in! By leaving intelligent, insightful comments on popular blogs, people will want to know more about you so they click through and check out what you have to say on your own blog. Doing this on a regular basis can bring in quite a bit of traffic, and since you’re participating on a related blog, you will not only get increased traffic, but you’ll also probably end up with some loyal readers and subscribers! Spend an hour or so of your internet time commenting on other blogs, and I promise the return in traffic will be well worth your time.

3. Link to other blogs like it’s going out of style. You may be wondering what I mean by this, and why would you want to send away traffic to other blogs? The worst thing you can possibly do as a blogger is to be “link-stingy”. By linking to other blogs, even to your competitors, it is almost a given that you’ll get linked back to. You see, the “blogosphere” is built around linking or spreading the “link-love” to other blogs/sites. When you spread the link love, people always return it and link back to you and send visitors your way. It may not be immediate, but trust me, at the very least, sometime down the road they’ll link to you and you’ll be glad they did. Not only does generously linking to others bring more traffic, it will also help boost your Google PageRank because eventually you might get links from the big time blogs/sites that have a higher PR than you, which is golden. I often link back to other blogs very quickly after they link to me, as it falls under “blogger etiquette”. Try it, you won’t be disappointed.

4. Build up quality content on a regular basis. Experts in the blogging field often say, “more content = more traffic”. This is a very true statement and it behooves you to post to your blog every day if you are able, as this gives the search engines more pages to index which in turn will bring you tons more traffic. Post to your blog everyday and after 6 months you’ll have, at the very least, 180 pages indexed in the search engines! That’s quite a lot of pages, and will definitely help people find your blog if they happen to be looking for a topic that you write about. Remember – more content = more traffic.

5. Be different, even controversial. This may sound evil, but you have to understand that EVERY niche has tons of different writers, so unless you’re one of the popular ones, you need to do something to stand out. Being controversial can be a very risky and tricky, but potentially very rewarding method to build traffic. In order to stand out from the ever-growing list of bloggers in your niche you need to be different. Most people are more traditional and write about the same thing that everyone else is. Be different! If you spot something on another blog that doesn’t sound right, then call them out on it. Remember the most important aspect of blogging is putting your opinion behind your words. You’re not CNN, you’re you, and you want to offer people your unique opinion. That’s why they read what you write, because they value your opinion on the subject. Be careful when you cross into the field of controversy, because if your facts aren’t straight, you could take a major hit in your credibility. Be sure you have facts and sources to back everything up that you say.

I sincerely hope that the above tips help you in your quest to garner more traffic. If followed correctly, I guarantee that the traffic will flow. You have to understand that while these are quick ways to get more traffic – the ultimate traffic builder is time. Keep posting quality content on a routine basis and the readers will come. I promise you that.

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