10 Easy Ways to Grow Your Blog Traffic

Want more traffic to your blog?  Of course you do.  But how do you get it?  It's a question that many bloggers struggle with, but thankfully there are several fairly easy ways you can start today to grow your blog's traffic.

Here's ten quick and easy ways you can start boosting your blog's traffic today:

1 - Develop a regular posting pattern, and stick to it.  This is an easy step that simply requires you altering your existing behavior.  Do some research into your blog's traffic patterns.  If your blog is like most, you will probably find that you get the most traffic during the week, especially from Tues-Thurs.  So make a point to post on these days first.  If you can crank out more posts, then add in the next days based on traffic.  But you want to make sure that you have new content appearing on the days when your traffic is highest.  And once you start posting on those days, do your best to have new posts up EVERY week on those days.  If you want to have new posts up on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday, that's fine but make sure they are up every week so your readers are 'trained' to know when new content is coming.

2 - Create a series.  Let's say you are a florist and you have a blog to help promote your business.  Every Wednesday (for example), you could have a new post on how to care and extend the life of your flowers once you get them home.  This way you know that you will have at least one post topic set for every week, and you can also run it on your best day for traffic.   
3- When it comes to links, be a giver.  Here's a nice little exercise, go back over the last week, and count the number of blogs that have linked to yours.  Now go back to your blog and count the number of blogs that YOU have linked to over the same time-frame.   Are more bloggers linking to you, or are you linking more to others?  Get in the habit of looking for outstanding content that you can bring to the attention of your readers via links.   This not only means you will be creating better content on your blog, but you will be bringing your blog to the attention of other bloggers.  Which means they will be more likely to link to you rblog in the future.  Which of course means more traffic for you!  What you could also do is incorporate the 'Create a series' idea from tip #2 above, and say every Thursday have a post with links to other blog posts that you found interesting over the last week.

4 - Encourage comments and highlight your best ones.  Let's be honest, when reading a blog post, many of us will scan to see how many comments it has received.  If a post has 8 comments, the odds are you will want to read the post, if for no other reason than to read the comments.  If your post has more comments, that means your readers are making its content more valuable, which means it has a better chance of being linked to.  Also if a reader leaves a really great comment that sparks more comments, add that comment to the end of your post, with a link to the reader's blog (if they have one).

5 - Share your knowledge.  If you are exceptional good at something, anything, share your knowledge with your readers on your blog.  It can be anything from social media marketing to model-making to basket-weaving.  Even the most common-sense tips can work if just one reader can find value in your ideas.  Think of ways you can share your knowledge to help others.

6 - Contribute on other blogs.  Notice I said 'contribute' and not comment.  All comments are not created equally, and if you go to every A-list blogger in your industry and leave the same 'Hey great post, thanks for sharing!' comment, the blogger and that blog's readers will all see right through you.  Instead, look for a way to actually contribute a meaningful point to an existing discussion.  This way you can actually learn something, and you will be helping to create valuable content for the blogger, which makes them FAR more likely to start commenting and linking to your blog. 

7 - Add your blog's URL to your email sig and any profiles you have on other social sites.  This seems like common sense, but so many of us forget this simple step.  But it's important because if you become a 'power user' on another social site, such as Twitter, then you are probably talking to a completely different community of people than those that read your blog.  So it only makes since to add a link to your blog so that these people that find you so interesting on Twitter, can follow your posts on your blog as well!

8 - Make it easy to bookmark and Digg/Stumble-Upon your posts.  Many bloggers have links at the end of every blog post that let you quickly and easily submit those posts to social-aggregator/bookmark sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us.  If you want to boost your traffic this is a great way to get your content in front of new eyeballs. 

9 - Blog about breaking news first.  Set up custom Google news searches for topics associated with your industry, so that you know about news as it breaks.  If you can get that hot news story on your blog first, you greatly increase your chances of boosting your traffic, and of also having that story become popular on aggregators such as Digg, Megite and TechMeme.  And sometimes it helps to just know the right people and contacts.  Remember what news source broke the YouTube acquisition by Google?  It wasn't the Wall-Street Journal or CNBC, it was the blog TechCrunch.

10 - Let your reader have a say in the content you create.  Who better understands what content appeals to readers, than the readers themselves?  So what tips do YOU use to boost your blog's traffic?  This list is hardly comprehensive, there's bound to be dozens of tips and tricks that I didn't mention that you smart people are already using with great success on your blogs.  What did I miss?