16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog By Denise Wakeman

You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

Http://www.bloglet.com

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)

http://www.my.yahoo.com

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

http://www.pingomatic.com

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines:
http://www.submitfire.com

6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to.
The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com

Increase Blog Traffic - Are These 3 Video Mistakes Stunting Your Blog Traffic? By Keith Goodrum

Videos have become an important blog traffic strategy, and shows no signs of slowing down. There is a lot of people flocking to online video sites like YouTube, Revver, Google Video and bloggers have taken noticed. In fact, YouTube has become the 3rd most visited site on the Internet today.

You can and should include videos in your blog and take advantage of the huge amount of traffic these site attract. This has become too important of a medium to ignore. So, get in there and grab your share of the traffic pie.

But, before you jump in and start throwing your videos all over the place; you should check out the 3 biggest mistakes being made by some bloggers. Here are the mistakes, and what you can do to correct them:

Only placing videos in one or two sites - Many people only use the grand daddy of these sites... YouTube. Now it is smart to be there, considering how many people visit this site everyday. But, many ignore all the other sites, and the traffic they could provide.

What to do to correct this - There are several sites out there that will distribute your video to many video websites at one time. The free version is Tube Mogul and the paid is Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser will charge you a monthly fee to use there service. But, if you are on a budget Tube Mogul will upload to most of the major players.

Using only screen capture recordings - Many people like to use screen capture recordings. It is a great way to demonstrate things your are doing on your computer screen. The problem comes is when this becomes the only way
What to do to correct this - Get your face on camera. It's important to get your face on camera. People are use to watching talking head, and like to connect a face to the voice.

Leaving out contact information - If you watch enough videos you will notice many people leave out contact information. It's not easy to find their websites, usually requiring you to look long and hard. Sometimes, you can't even find this information. This make is tough to attract traffic to your blog if you are missing this information

What to do instead - Get your blog URL in as many places a possible. Add it to your profile page, subscriber page and on every video. One place many people over look to add a URL is in the description page.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Keith_Goodrum