Have you recently started a new blog and are wondering how to drive quality traffic to it? I know a few new bloggers that write at least a post a day but don’t seem to generate that much traffic.
In this will post I will discuss a few ideas and techniques to help drive traffic to a new blog.

1. Leave comments on other blogs

   I’m sure there would be many blogs you have come across that you may or may not have liked. Rather than simply leaving the site you could leave a comment at the end of their post content that you enjoyed reading or that you found useful. By leaving a comment you not only leave a link to your blog but, you also engage with another blogger and its potential readers. Now think about it… if that blog receives 1000 visits per day and you leave an informative comment then you have a pretty good chance that the reader of your comment will come to your blog.
   Keep leaving those comments, and make yours stand out from the rest. Don’t just leave a comment such as “hi, I really enjoyed reading your post” for the sake of leaving your URL link. The whole point is to get potential readers come to you blog and stay there. Although this might not bring you thousands of readers at once - you never know when that one reader will be someone influential.

2. Participate in writing guest posts for other blogs

   If a blog reaps over 1000 visits a day then wouldn’t you want to write for that blog? In this case both the blogger and the guest benefit. The blogger gets a free post and the guest gets a free link.  

3. Communicate What Your Blog is about

   This should be clear so that a visitor landing on your blog can instantly see what the blog is about and what’s in it for them? It’s the same principal as when your looking through a pile of magazines deciding on which one to read, you are unlikely to read a magazine that you don’t know the topic off or that doesn’t look interesting.  The point is, If visitors can see what the blog is about immediately then they are likely to stick around on a blog for longer. There are many ways for getting people to a blog - but the key thing is to have something that communicates strongly to them when they get there.

4. What Makes You Different?

   There are 50,000,000 blogs in the world today and growing by over 200,000 new blogs a day. What makes your blog different? You need to communicate clearly how your blog is different and unique. You can do this in the design, branding and content. New blogs need to work harder at achieving this but it can easily be done.

5. Promote your RSS Feed

   One way you can do this is to display your RSS feeds on each category. This is so easy to do and a great advantage of adding RSS feeds to each category is that it will display a single category feed when viewing a specific category. This makes it easier for readers to subscribe to their favourite category and it also makes it easier to submit your RSS feeds to directories and bookmarking sites. Read More

6. Content

Ultimately it is the content that you write that will make your blog popular and increase the chances of you getting loyal and returning visitors, this is key in growing your readership. Write unique content that your people want to read and try to write them in a way that will engage your readers. Remember if they like what they read then they are more likely to bookmark your posts and come back.

7. Increase your Blog Traffic using TRACKBACKS

   By using trackbacks you are allowing other bloggers to linkback to your site via a post in there a blog. TrackBacks are fantastic automatic features that come with major blogging platforms likes Wordpress, Nucleus, TypePad, BoastMachine, and Movable Type.  Some blogging systems like Blogger require plugins to have Trackback feature. Read more

Further Reading
There is much more to be said on the topic of building readership on a new blog

You can find them on my 10 blog traffic tips page. Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

BLOGRUSH is the fastest and easiest way to instantly drive a flood of targeted readers to your blog…ABSOLUTELY FREE! As a blogger there’s probably one thing you want more than anything else…more readers for your blog! And you want your blogs traffic to grow.

As you may or may not realise most of the options for driving more traffic to your blog are either really expensive or they take a lot of your time. Well now’s there’s another option. It’s CHEAPER, It’s FASTER and it can grow your blogs traffic EXPONENTIALLY without you doing any work at all, and best of all it can send you the right kind of traffic because it will be people that are already reading a blog similar to yours. You can get started in less than 5 minutes and its completely FREE. Its called BlogRush - your blog syndication network.

Here’s how it works, take a moment to sign up for a free account, and then you’ll enter some information about your blog. You’ll enter the name of your blog, you’ll select a category that best describes your blog’s content. Then you’ll need to enter the URL to your blog’s RSS feed. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is or if your blog even has one please see the help section of BlogRush website.

After you’ve entered this information you’ll simply copy and paste the small piece of code to your blog. If you don’t know how to do this you can visit the help section of BlogRush website for step-by-step instructions.

Now when every page of your blog loads it will also load the bloggers widget. When the widget loads you’ll notice that it contains 5 clickable blog posts and the names of the blogger author the post belongs to. Clicking on any of these links will take someone directly to that blog so they can read the entire post but these links will open in a new browser window so the visitor doesn’t actually leave your blog. BlogRush will do its best to serve links related to your blogs content using a combination of the category you selected and proprietary technology that BlogRush continues to improve.

Now lets talk about how this widget brings you more traffic. When any page on your blog is loaded the bloggers widget loads with a new set of links and each time the bloggers widget loads you’ve earned the right to have one of your blog posts titles in a link loaded inside the widget of other blogs in your category. This is called a SYNDICATION CREDIT. So if your blog currently gets 100 total pages a day you’ll have one of your blog titles shown across the bloggers network automatically 100 times a day.

If you look closely at the bottom of the bloggers widget you’ll notice that it says, “Add your blog posts - free” and you’ll also see a little white tab containing the BlogRush logo. If someone clicks on either these areas, they’ll be taken to the BlogRush site where they can sign up for an account and start hosting the widget on their blog, but the BlogRush widget is specially coded so our system knows exactly where every new user comes from. Any user that should join BlogRush after clicking the referring areas on the widget that you host on your blog will be permanently assigned in BlogRush system as your referral. Here’s why this matters, As you already know whenever someone goes to any page in your blog that shows the widget one of your blog posts titles will be shown across the network on another blog in your category, so if your blog posts has 100 page views today you’ll have your blog post title shown across the network 100 times today. Now here is where BlogRush really goes to work for you to bring you lots of exposure, lets say Bob comes to your blog and clicks on your widget then he decides to sign up and add the widget to his blog, now here’s what happens whenever someone goes to any page on Bobs blog that shows the widget, you’ll also have one of your blog post titles shown across the network on another blog in your category. Remember this is in addition to the exposure you get from your own traffic. You should also know that there’s no limit to the amount of exposure that your referrals can get for you. Lets say that Bob has a really popular blog and gets 10,000 page views a day, this means Bob is going to get you an additional 10,000 exposures across the network in your category everyday. BUT IT GETS EVEN BETTER…lets say Jen goes to Bob’s blog and click on his referral link widget and decided to join BlogRush, now whenever someone goes to any page on Jen’s blog that shows the widget, you’ll also have one of your blog post titles shown across the network on another blog in your category. But it doesn’t sop there! Not only are you getting exposure from your own traffic everyday and Bob’s traffic everyday and Jen’s traffic everyday but you’ll also get exposure from everyone Jen refers and everyone they refer all the way through 10 generations of referrals. This means there’s no limit to the amount of exposure that BlogRush can bring you. You’ll see the full breakdown of the referral system on your BlogRush dashboard when you sign in plus you’ll also see how many referrals you have and how much exposure they’re getting for you whenever you want. With estimates of over 50,000,000 blogs in the world today and growing by over 200,000 new blogs a day there is no shortage of opportunities for you to end up with many referrals for your bloggers account in the short term and in the long term, and because the BlogRush widget does all the work for you, you can simply add it to your blog and forget about it.

Additional information

Here’s some additional information you should know about BlogRush:

• If you have more than one blog you can easily add them to the same account. You can even decide how you want your syndication credits distributed amongst all of your blogs.
• There are two types of filters that you can set-up   for your BlogRush account. The first kind is a Keyword Filter. For example you can add the word “iphone” to your filter list and you’ll never see a blog post tile show up inside the widget that’s served on your blog with the keyword “iphone” in it. The second type of filter is simply a Blog Filter. You can add the URL to a blog that you know of that you’d never want their posts to show up inside the widget on your blog.
• You will also be given a special direct referral link so you can promote BlogRush anywhere that you want, of course without spamming or abusing the Internet in any way. Should anyone click on the referral link and join BlogRush it has the same affect that if someone clicked on your widget and ended up joining BlogRush.

BlogRush can start working for you in the next 5 minutes, click here to register and start driving more traffic to your blog today.

To get someone’s attention with Blog Rush, the primary thing you need to do is write COMPELLING 7 WORD HEADLINES (or approximately no more than 40 characters including spaces). This guarantee’s your whole headline will be syndicated in Blog Rush’s widget without getting cutoff.

Several common mistakes I’ve seen already is people who are:

Writing LONG headlines which get cutoff before you can understand the topic of the post.  Read More

I’m already too late to announce BlogRush with this post because it’s already all over the blogosphere, the social networks and the blog forums.
            
John Reese, Founder of BlogRush, has released the new exciting tool called BlogRush,  which is a blog traffic exchange widget.
You can visit John’s blog where he talks about the new release and hear what others have to say.

BlogRush is basically a way to group together related content across blogs. The way it works is really simple, you just sign up and insert the code in your template and the BlogRush widget appears on your blog instantly. Similar to the one you see on the right. You earn a credit each time it is displayed when your page loads. You are rewarded by using your credits to display your blog content on other blogs that use the widget. Once you have placed the widget THAT’S IT, you don’t need to do anything further, you start earning credits immediately.

When you sign up with BlogRush it asks you for your feed URL. The reason it asks you for this is because it takes your RSS feed content across the web and places it on blogs that have similar topic and content to yours. BlogRush will show your content on the widget of other blogs that it thinks are similar to yours. This should increase the click-through rate.

BlogRush has a ten-tier referral system, which means you will be credited if anyone signs up from following your links up to ten times below you. So basically when someone you refer into BlogRush starts to earn credits you are rewarded with credits too. When your referral refers people they earn credits, you get some more again, and so on until ten levels below you.

Will You Get Traffic From BlogRush?

Of course you will get some but as with any new program don’t expect instant results it might take some time especially if your blog doesn’t get many page views a month. Give it time and try to place the widget above the fold meaning anywhere on the page where users don’t have to scroll down to see it. That way you have more chance of it being noticed.

If you would like join the BlogRush program and soak up those credits before everyone else hears about it, now is the right time to join and insert the widget on your site. Here is the link -

http://www.blogrush.com

What you should know first - WHAT IS A TRACKBACK

TrackBacks are fantastic automatic features that come with major blogging platforms likes Wordpress, Nucleus, TypePad, BoastMachine, and Movable Type.  Some blogging systems like Blogger require plugins to have Trackback feature.

If you don’t know what a trackback is, it’s an automate linkage between two blog posts, one that is your own and the other that is on the site you are linking to. It’s an effective method used to communicate back and forth between two blog posts that reference each other and have something in common.

Something else you should know is that Trackbacks will not give you better search engine ranking – why? Because external links in the comments column including TrackBacks do not contribute to your Google Pagerank or any other search engine page rank. Although you might think this is not fair the one good thing to come out of it is the incoming links from other blogs that increases your blog traffic which is what you want.

Trackbacks are a fairly new feature and not many bloggers out there are aware of it or know how to use it. Using Trackbacks and knowing how to use them effetcively can increase your blog traffic. I’m going to explain how to use it along with a few good tips .So lets get started!

How to send a Trackback – STEP BY STEP

What usually happens is you the blogger will read a post on another blog site and if you have something to say about that post then you leave a comment right? Well with a trackback, instead of leaving a comment on THEIR site you leave a comment on YOUR site.

The best way to do this is to write a review about the post/article you have just read and that you want to comment on, it doesn’t have to be long. Make sure your post includes a link back to the original post otherwise it wont send a trackback ping to the other blog. Prior to publishing your post make sure that you include the trackback URL. You will find it at the bottom of the other blogger’s post. Once you find the link copy the Trackback URL and then go to your own blog post you have just created and paste the Trackback URL in the space provided for Trackbacks. If you use Wordpress you will find this towards the bottom of your “Write Post” page. This will send the notification to the blog you linked to otherwise know as a “Trackback ping” It’s that simple!

What now happens is that the other blog you just wrote the post about will receive the “Trackback ping”, (awaiting approval). Once the author of the website has approved your trackback it will automatically display a backlink and a short summary of the article you wrote about in the comments section of their post. For example, take a look at this post “top 9 Christmas Wordpress themes” and see how the first commentator has used trackback that contains a backlink to their site.

In saying all this you don’t necessarily have to know how to use Trackbacks in order to use them, because by default I think the newer versions of Wordpress have tracking features enabled so you can simply create a new post and send Trackbacks automatically and vice versa you can receive trackbacks as well. You will be notified by email when you receive new Trackbacks the same way it does when you recive new comments.
To check if you have it enabled or not follow the guidelines below:

1. Go to Options > Discussion and Check the two following checkboxes 

• ‘Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article.’ (This option has to be checked in order to send Trackbacks)
   
• ‘Allow link notifications from other Weblogs. (This option has to be checked in order to receive Trackbacks)

5 Trackback Tips - How to use Trackback Effectively

1. Leave a comment as you would do normally on the post before sending a trackback. This way the author recognises you are interested in their article and they remember you better, it helps to build a better relationship. 
2. Make sure when sending Trackback pings that your blog post is relevant to the one you are referring to. Otherwise, your post might not be accepted or worse still might end up in the span net.
3. Send Trackback pings to high traffic blogs like problogger and popular blog posts. You can Google these in seconds. This will send some of their traffic to your blog.
4. Send Trackbacks to blogs that have similar content as your own so that people reading their article will also be interested in reading yours.  For example if your blog is about blogging for money then link to another blog or post that is also about the same or similar topic.
5. Use eye catchy titles that people will notice. Remember that a popular post you want to send a trackback ping to may have hundred of comments already so make yours standout that will make potential visitors want to click on it and read.

How to send a TEST Trackback

Ok so now you know what a Trackback is and to use them lets have a go and sending a TEST trackback. If you want to have a go at trackbacks to see how they work you can send a Trackback to this post. Simply copy the Trackback url for this post, (http://bloggerholic.com/blog-marketing/increase-blog-traffic-using-trackbacks-109.htm).
Go to your blog; write a new post talking about this post and paste the trackback url  somewhere within your post content
and hit publish.

If your ping worked, you should see your Trackback on the comments section of this page at the bottom.

For more information about Trackback you can read the article “introduction to trackbacks” by Problogger (Darren Rowse).

I discovered StumbleUpon on Google Analytics when I saw how much traffic this site was getting fro it. I didn’t know of it until i found out someone obviously discovered my site and added it on StumbleUpon.  Nearly 50% of my traffic comes from StumbleUpon alone. 
StumbleUpon works like a TV where you can use its very own toolbar that behaves like a remote if you like and ‘channel-surf the internet’. Members can surf the Internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar a bit like flicking through channels on a TV. In doing this you can imagine how many sites there are competing with yours, so how do you make your site stand out from the rest so users stay on your site rather thank flick through to the next? 
In this article, I will suggest some easy steps you can take to attract more StumbleUpon users and keep them on your site rather than have them stumble away.

1. What you Blog is about

Otherwise known as the core statement whihc tells a visitor what your blog is about. On my site I have this on the right hand sidebar above the fold which means users can see it without having to scroll down the page. The description only needs to be a couple of lines summarising what your blog is about. Make it short but to the point.  If a StumbleUpon user can catch sight of something that interests then straight away then they’re likely to stay longer.

2. Use influential visual cues

Ask yourself this, when you switch channels on a TV looking for something interesting to watch what is it that you look for? The decsion you make to stick to a channel or flick to another is frequently determined by its visual cues. Even with no sound or a program in another language can attract people simply by its visual cues.
The same applies to websites. If your blog has powerful visual clues for example a picture of money on the header like on this site, tells the reader that the site has to be about money or a picture of a couple has to be a dating site then those are powerful visual cues that can communicated a thousand words. 

3. Move your content above the fold

Above the fold means everything a users sees before they have to scroll down. When you search the net and come across a website you often read what is at the top and if you like it you scroll down to read on, however if you don’t like what you see straigh way chances are you move on right? StumbleUpon users have thousands of sites to flick through so it’s important that you keep all the key information that you think visitors will want to read about above the fold.

If you look at my blog home page you will notice that that I have all my recent articles appear at the top and on the rest of my pages I have the most popular posts and top posts for today all appearing above the fold. I also use the top part of my sidebar to introduce my blog.

4. Be original and appealing

I’ve had people tell me that the theme is not that important its more to do with the content you offer. Those people in my opinion are wrong. I know I judge a site based on its presentation. A good theme can give you a personality straight away. It’s like they say with interviews…first impressions count and it’s the same principle here. An attractive website design will attract users and encourage them to stay longer.

If you use Wordpress you will be fascinated with the number of themes you have available to choose from. Even if you like a theme but don’t like the colours its very easy to customise using the style sheet.

I hope the above tips will help you. The importance in all these tips is to show people that have stumbled on your site what it has to offer at first glance. This should help you get more traffic from StumbleUpon and improve your readership almost instantly.

Digg is a popular and powerful example of social media. How can it help you build your business or reputation? And how do you get started? This 10-minute screencast tutorial is designed for newcomers to Digg. Amy Gahran shows you how to register, how to Digg and get Dugg, and practical tips for everyday Digging. Make Digg part of your search visibility program.

 

Check the performance of your site and make changes if required and keep adding new content. You must know how many visitors your websites gets, which country your visitors come from and which pages they view. To find this information check the web stats, this can be accessed via your hosting CPanel. Also check the affiliate statistics report if your use any affiliates. Google Analytics is by far my favorite and it gives you all the information you need to know and it’s Free.

Offer a newsletter related to your site. This is a good way of keeping in touch with your site visitors or clients and it’s a good way to keep your visitors coming back to revisit your site. If you are using Wordpress then you can download the Plugin called Subscribe2.

- Joke of the day
- Horoscopes
- Picture of the day – for example if you have a travel website then you can insert a different travel picture everyday or  once a week. This will attract your visitors and make them want to come back and see more.
- Link of the day