Start Up Business Help - 16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

What do you do? But no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering, you keep publishing, days go by. Useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy, you've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy.

That you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog, in no particular order of importance, here are 16 steps. You must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site, like any website you own.

Associates, clients, colleagues, friends, set up an email subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family. 1.

Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine. 2.

Useful comments with a link to your blog, " Write intelligent. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. 3.

Do this every time you publish. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. 4.

Submit your blog to traditional search engines. 5.

Submit your blog to blog directories. 6.

This can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you; tip: Create a form to track your submissions.

Add a link to your blog in your email signature file. 7.

Put a link to your blog on every page of your website. 8.

Make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue, if you publish a newsletter. 9.

Etc, white papers, reports, sales letters, include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences. 10.

Brochures and flyers, print your blog URL on your business cards. 11.

RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries. These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news readers). It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. Or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication, the acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. 12.

Articles and websites in your posts include links to other blogs, post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; 13.

The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site. Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. What is TrackBack? Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. 14.

Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below). Write articles to post around the web in article directories. 15.

Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 16.

Average length of visit, how many page views, tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors.