Directing Traffic To Your Blog

Before you can even think about making any money with your blog you need to first make sure that people are seeing your blog! Traffic is key in your success but it is not going to happen over night! You can't expect people to just magically know that your blog exists especially in an internet world that has millions of blogs! Apart from the obvious things like telling your friends about your blogs, posting your link in your email and forum signatures...etc. here are some other ways to help drive traffic to your new blog! TRAFFIC EXCHANGES With a traffic exchange you visit other blogs (usually for a set amount of time.. 20-30 seconds) to earn credits or points, in return you can use the credits you have earned to have other people click on your blog! Kind of like, you scratch my back and I will scratch yours! A lot of people think that traffic exchanges are a waste of time but I beg to differ. While waiting for the timer to time out I always sift through each blog and if I find one that I think is interesting I will bookmark it to go back to! Here are two that I use: Blog Soldiers Blog Explosion Myspace Yes, myspace can be a great tool for networking and promoting your new blog! You can use your own personal page to advertise it and/or start a new myspace page specifically for promoting your blog! Entrecard I am fairly new to Entrecard but have to say that I love it! How it works is that you place a code on your blog with a small blog advertisement and you click to "drop" your card on the page. For everyone blog that you "drop" on you get an Entrecard Credit or ecredit. You can use your ecredits to buy an advertisement for your blog on someone else's blog and others can pay you ecredits to advertise on your blog! Ofcourse, the more credits you earn, the more places you can advertise on! I have to say that I have had great results with Entrecard and my traffic stats have been enough proof for me to stick around! Entrecard Join Blog Communities These are blog networking communities that help you advertise your blog and talk with other bloggers. You can get a lot of tips and advice.. and traffic from these places! Blog Catalog My Blog Log Twitter Twitter is also a great place to find new people. You send out tweets giving your updates, basically saying what you are doing at that time.. etc. You can include links to your blog or other websites in your tweets. People can follow you and get your update every time you change your status. It can be fun, interesting and a great tool all in one! Feedburner A great tool to build your rss feed, your subscribers and find out all of your stats on your blog! feedburner Technorati Is the leading blog search engine. Sign up, make your profile and submit your blog(s) to get them listed in their search engine! Technorati Link Exchanges Find other blogs on the same subject and contact the blogger about exchanging links. You put their link somewhere on your page and they put YOUR link on theirs! It helps to build your traffic and your ratings! Also, don't forget to digg your blog and stumble it as well! These things should keep you busy for awhile. It may take a bit of time to sign up for all of these places but it will be worth the time in the end building that traffic to your blog!