As bloggers we know that there are massive amounts of ways to drive traffic to your blog.  In my opinion, the most important is relevant content that’s both personal and creative.  Personal allows your potential clients to get to know the real you while creative offers solutions to their everyday challenges or concerns.

However, there does come a time when we’re looking to expand our blog reach and need to dive into additional options.  While the six I’ve outlined below may be something you’ve tried already, my hope is to plant a few new seeds that could grow into long term traffic solutions for your blog.

1.  Comment on Blogs

The goal is not to drop by, plug your business and move on.  The goal is to build relationships and forge connections with other bloggers by offering insightful and educational comments.  Just think about the possibilities.  If you offer advice that a potential client finds useful, it’s likely they will visit your site to learn more about you and your business.

2.  Use Social Bookmarking

Submit your articles (rss feeds) to various social bookmarking sites.  Here are just a few:

• Delicious
• Digg
• Squidoo Lenses – Once you’ve created your Squidoo lens, you will want to ping your lens at http://squidutils.com/
• Stumbleupon
• HubPages
• Tagfoot
• Netvouz

You also need to add a social bookmarking plugin to your blog.  There are several popular options for WordPress including:

• Bookmarkify
• Sociable
• SexyBookmarks

My bookmark plugin of choice is Add to Any.

3.  Submit your site to Directories

• Abcblogdirectory
• Blogburst
• BlogCatalog
• Bloggeries
• Getblogs
• Globeofblogs
• Goblog4i
• Ontoplist
• Technorati
• Topblogarea
• Topsiteswebdirectory

4.  Submit your blog to Search Engines

• RSS feed to Yahoo! – Add your RSS feed to Yahoo! This will include it into their feed directory as well as your ‘My Yahoo!’ account.
• MSN Live Blog Search
• Google Blog Search – Make sure that Google Blog search knows about your blog by adding it here. Very quick,easy and beneficial.
• Bloglines – Add all of your RSS feeds to Bloglines.

5.  Use Feedburner –

Once you’ve completed the steps above, ping your blog to Technorati and allow your visitors to subscribe to your feed through Feedburner.  To “ping” is a way of sending an alert to a website(s) and notifying them that you have updated the content on your site/blog.  This process can be quite tedious if you’re submitting from one site to the next.  Quickly send updates to multiple sites with Ping-O-Matic.

6.  Write better articles and more often!  Content, content, content

Writing superior content can be one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your blog and build a loyal following.  Compiling a list of great content not only substantiates you as an authority in your field, but also in your local market.

However, it’s not just about quality.  It’s also about quantity.  You will quickly lose subscribers if you’re not posting on a consistent basis and adding fresh content several times per week.

Put you (your heart and soul) into each post and the traffic will come.  Being anonymous can be convenient at times, but to generate loyal blog followers they will need to connect with your voice by hearing what’s important to you. Find your voice and you’ll find loyal and raving fans willing to share the love of your blog with others.

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