Easy and Free Ways to Increase Blog Site Traffic

By now just about everyone has a blog on their site. If you don't yet, you should definitely look into starting a blog of your own. With easy and free options like Blogger and Wordpress, it's actually a lot easier than it may look.

Why bother starting a blog? Because blogs could possibly be the easiest type of site to promote that has ever been created. The whole concept of blogging is based around interlinking to other interesting sites, often without being approached by the site owner first. Most blog platforms even include a trackback feature to encourage blogging about other people's sites. This is a drastic change from the view of traditional webmasters who fear linking out will hurt their site's ranking.

Submit your blog to as many free blog directories as possible. Just like submitting a regular site to free web directories gives you backlinks and Pagerank, submitting your blog will do the same thing for it. Also, if your blog generates an RSS feed (most blogging software does this for you), you can submit that to another list of RSS directories also, maximizing your exposure.

Blogs also give you an easy way to take part in the social bookmarking (Web 2.0) phenomenon and get some great targeted traffic. While most social bookmarking sites let you post pages from regular websites, the very structure of a blog makes it a great fit for bookmarking and sharing with others in the community.

Technorati is the best place to start with tagging and pinging your blog. All you have to do is sign up for an account and "claim" your blog with a couple of easy steps. Now you can add tags to every post and your blog will show up on Technorati for those keywords. If you're using Wordpress, there are a few plugins that make tagging easy (Simple Tags and Ultimate Tag Warrior are probably the best right now.)

Technorati is just the beginning, though. There are literally hundreds of social bookmarking sites now, with more new ones popping up every day. Obviously, time becomes a factor at some point, but you should try to sign up and post your blog at as many social bookmarking sites as possible.

Of course, you can still use traditional online marketing methods to bring traffic to your blog just like it was any other site. You can get great traffic from writing and submitting articles or press releases that link to your blog. Be sure to also link to your blog in your signatures on any related forums you may participate in. Try to post quality information so people will be interested in reading what you have posted on your blog.

Blog sites are far easier to promote than traditional websites, just because of their design and interactive structure. Take advantage of as many of these interlinking features (trackbacks, comments, tagging, etc.) to maximize the traffic to your blog. Submitting to blog and RSS feed directories, along with traditional methods of directory submission, article writing, and link exchange should also give your blog a significant increase in website traffic.