Top 10 ways to drive traffic to a new blog

Once you’ve launched a blog, added good content to it and have a few blog monetization strategies in place, you’ll need a constant stream of targeted traffic to build your readership.

If we narrow things down to the very basics, there are only two types of traffic that you can generate: paid traffic and free traffic. And while there are literally thousands of different places that you can buy traffic from, today we’ll only focus on tentraffic generation methods that require little or no money. These are 10 methods you can start using this same week to start building momentum and kick-start your blog’s readership immediately.

1. Make your RSS feed available to everyone
The RSS feed of your blog is one of the easiest ways to build repeat traffic. Mostly because once people are subscribed to it, they will keep receiving your messages until they decide to remove it. Each blog entry you do is a new opportunity to get those readers back to your site – so it is very important that you keep your feed in tip-top shape.

While every blogging platform comes with a built-in RSS feed, many of them are not as user-friendly as they should be. For that reason it is important to re-structure your feed in a way that can be read by virtually every feed reader and aggregator software.

The service I use and recommend to do this is called FeedBurner. Not only will they make your feed more compatible for all readers, they also give you good statistics on how your feed is being read and syndicated throughout the web.

2. Allow e-mail subscriptions
Blogs and RSS are relatively new technologies and the vast majority of internet users are still not completely familiar with them. So to maximize your readership, you need to give people a way to subscribe to your content using a technology they’re already familiar with… and that’s e-mail. Even when feed readers and aggregators are common for tech savvy webmasters and blog owners, 3/4 of my readers are subscribed via e-mail and not through RSS.

There are many options out there that allow you to do this. Some of them have the big plus of automatically sending an e-mail to all your subscribers every time you post something on your blog (this is done by parsing your RSS feed). To do this, I use (and LOVE) a service called aweber.com – mostly because it allows me to stay in touch with my readers by broadcasting personal messages to them with information I don’t care publishing in the blog.

3. Write guest posts for other blogs
Writing valuable content to publish in your blog should be your top priority. However, every now and then, you should also create content and instead of publishing it, you should send it to other bloggers for them to use. Contributing posts to other blogs is a great way to put your name and ideas in front of a completely different audience.

Others care for their blogs and their readerships just as much as you do, and they will not publish crappy content. So in order to succeed with this strategy, you must submit super-valuable content to them. Else they will simply not publish it and you’ll have lost a great opportunity. Finally, take note that before you start sending content to others, you must contact them first and ask if it would be ok for you to send them an exclusive article for them to consider publishing in their blog.

4. Submit content to article directories
The above strategy does not work 100% of the time. Don’t get discouraged! If the post you sent a particular blogger got rejected, simply re-package it as an article, add a signature file to it with a link back to your blog and send it over to the article directories… other webmasters will gladly take it and publish it in their websites.

Submitting content to article directories is an activity you should try to do at least once a week. Every time one of your articles gets picked up by a webmaster is a new opportunity to reach potentially thousands of new readers… plus each time one of your articles gets published, it means you’re getting link back to your site (which boosts your link popularity and increases your search engine rankings). There are thousands of article directories out there… but don’t bother trying to find them all… just use the big 3 and you should be fine: GoArticles, ArticleCity and EzineArticles.

5. Join blog carnivals and blogger communities
A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes the best content from different resources that was published in a given week. If your content is selected to be in a blog carnival, you’ll get a good spike in traffic. This traffic generation method is easy to use because you are already publishing good content, so all you have to do is submit that content for consideration to be included in the carnival. To find good blog carnivals that are related to your blog’s niche, check out BlogCarnival.

Another great way to boost your readership is to join a couple of good blogger communities. A lot of people use these communities to find good blogs to read about a particular topic, so make sure your blog is listed. Get started by joining MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. You’ll find more blog communities related to your niche as you go along, but these two are a great starting point and the ones that will probably send you the most traffic using this particular method.

6. Comment on other blogs
Bloggers LOVE IT when their readers take the time to leave a comment or engage in a lively discussion about the article they just posted. Even better, when you leave a comment on someone’s blog (and if it gets approved), a link back to your blog is automatically posted on their blog leading back to yours (again building your link popularity and search engine rankings).

This traffic building strategy works particularly well if you are among the first 3 people to comment a particular post and if the comments you leave are smart and relevant to the post in question. Sometimes it helps to be a bit controversial to spark a good discussion on the subject – just don’t overdo it or the strategy will back-fire and you may end up getting flamed or banned for good from that blog.

7. Become an active member of forums
Find a few good forums that are related to your niche and become an active member in them. Answer the questions other members are posting and be helpful and friendly to them. This will very quickly boost you to an “expert status” and earn you the trust of other members.

Each forum post can have a short signature file with a link back to your blog. You should also consider every forum post you make as a new opportunity to gather a few readers. If you keep at it constantly, your efforts will help you to quickly build up a solid and loyal readership.

8. Use trackbacks
Commenting on another person’s post directly on your blog is another great opportunity to build relationships (and traffic). When you link to a blog that has trackbacks enabled, you will most likely get that blogger’s attention – and many times they will reciprocate with a link back to your blog in one of their posts.

Here’s a short tutorial on trackbacks made my by good friend and blogger extraordinaire Mr. Jack Humphrey:

9. Make your posts easy to social bookmark
This is a very simple step, but it is often overlooked by many new bloggers. If the content you are producing is really worth reading (and you should be making it so), there is a good chance that people will want to bookmark it in the social networks… and you should make it easy for them to do so.

All you need to do is add some social bookmarking and tagging buttons to all your website pages. If you run static HTML or PHP pages, you can use the bookmarking links generator. If you run a WordPress blog, use the “sociable plugin” to add the buttons automatically to every post.

10. Join social networking sites
Web 2.0 offers an almost infinite number of possibilities to network with people and turn them into blog readers. Take the time to join social networks like facebook and myspace, set up your profile and start interacting with people with similar interests, participate in their groups, forums and events and you’ll quickly become a well-known blogger in those circles.