How to get traffic to your blog

I began blogging on 15 December last year. My four and a half months experience in the game have been both time consuming and demanding. Good content is not enough. It is even more important to engage in active promotion. Increasing blog traffic is paramount to being able to sustain the blog, obtain reasonable search engine ratings and to earn advertising revenue.

Over the time I have gradually discovered a number of ways to increase blog traffic. I tried Digg but it didn't work for me. I am not really a great social networker so Facebook and My Space were non starters.

Firstly a few essentials. Yahoo's MyBlogLog is an essential. It provides an opportunity to develop relationships with other bloggers and to explore other sites. You should be able to get some traffic from here. Blog Catalogue provides a free service that lists your sites and picks up your latest postings. Then there is Technorati which provides a blog rating based on traffic to your blog.

Then there are sites which work on a type of credit system. You include a widget on your blog and visitors can explore other similar blogs by clicking on the widget. BlogRush is one of these.

Webring has worked quite well for me. Ling to the site, set up an account and begin joining rings. As with most sites there is a free and a subscription based service. I have now joined over 70 of these webrings and they do bring in traffic on a fairly sustainable basis. Traffic can be increased by paying a small fee for promotion.

Blog Explosion works on a slightly different basis. Sign up and submit your blogs for approval. Then you can surf through blogs to earn credits and assign these credits to your blogs. Surfing through these blogs exposes you to many blogs of varying quality. If you discover a site that interests you then simply click the BlogMark link and you are free to revisit the site at any time. Blog explosion shows significant and fairly immediate results, but requires frequent surfing to keep the traffic flowing.

I have signed up with del.icio.us, but have not used it extensively. Stumble Upon provides a similar service, but from my side totally underused.

Of course another key way to get traffic is through the search engines. Try to optimise each post for key words. I use Google Adwords for that, and it makes a difference. But it still isn't easy. Your rating and existing traffic affect how far you get.

After four months of blogging I have not yet received my first Adsense payment - but I'm over 60% there! My traffic is increasing - hopefully too the earnings!

I would like to build up a knowledge base here on increasing traffic - genuine ways only, not untried and costly promotional schemes!

Please use the comment facility to post any traffic generating schemes that have worked for you.