What Next? Challenge for any Business

1. Tell people about it.
2. Write articles which link back to your blog posts. Not just articles in article directories, but also Squidoo lenses, Hubs, Gather pages, Ning pages, Multiply pages, Google pages ....
3. Get active on social bookmarking sites, and add a link to the blog on all of your social networking profiles.
4. Visit the blogs of other people who write on similar topics and leave thoughtful comments there. With links.
5. If you're on Facebook or LinkedIn, you can pull in an RSS feed from your blog to your profile.
6. Add a link to the blog on your email signature.
7. Put your blog URL on your usiness cards. If you don't have business cards, get business cards.
8. Locate forums where people are discussing the topic of your blog, put your blog URL in your signature, and make intelligent, helpful comments in the forum.
9. Write a press release about something newsworthy and tie it in with your blog topic. (Note - don't write a press release ABOUT your blog - that won't work.)
10. Give away your writing. Do guest blogging on the sites of others.
11. Do "link love" posts every so often. These are posts that many bloggers are doing these days which are simply lists of some of the other posts that they are reading around the web, with links to them. This helps to get the attention of the people that you are linking to, and helps you to develop relationships with them.
12. Highlight your blog on your Squidoo lens, Hub, Ning page, or Multiply page about the topic, using RSS feeds.
13. Promote your blog anywhere else in the Web 2.0 world (that doesn't have RSS capability) by linking directly to your best individual posts.
14. Sign up with Technorati and make use of Technorati tags in your posts.
15. Write Search Engine Optimised blog posts. Every post is a page. Read up on SEO and follow the guidelines.
16. Submit your blog to directories. Here is the best list I've found of places to submit your feed or blog, compiled by Luigi Canali De Rossi, who writes under the pseudonym Robin Good.
17. Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites
18. Add a link to the blog on your bio whenever you publish it or send it to someone.
19. Ping your blog. Use blogging software that can be set up to do that automatically. Wordpress is an example, but not the only one.
20. Subnit your blog to search engines.
21. Write to other bloggers suggesting a link trade or a guest post trade.
22. Put up a link list of your favorite blogs and let those bloggers know about it. They might just reciprocate.
23. Reply to comments. If people see that you read and reply to comments, they will read more and comment more.
24. Create a video about your topic and upload it to YouTube. Include your blog URL in the video and on your YouTube profile.
25. Rinse and repeat for other video sites.
26. Use Craigslist (more details here)

• The community section, located in the top left corner of the main Craigslist screen, provides many opportunities for publicizing your blog. Post in the community section most appropriate to your topic, and provide interesting information, with a link to the full article on your blog. (You can also find guest bloggers for your blog through the "volunteers" section there.)
• Classes. Hold an online class about a topic related to your blog, and advertise it in the Craigslist "classes" section.
• Barter. You can offer link exchanges in the parter section, but you can get a lot more creative than that. Post something along the lines of "I have a blog about xyz and am seeking someone to promote it for me in a creative way. Send me an email with your promotional idea and what you'd like in exchange."
• Services. If you offer services in any way related to the topic of your blog, or writing services in general, post in this section with a link to your blog as evidence of your expertise.
• Forums. As with any other forum, good quality posts containing your link can translate to blog traffic.

1. Write an eBook or white paper. If you know enough to blog about a topic then you know enough to write an eBook or white paper. You can promote it through different channels where you can't promote a blog - including places like Clickbank, where you can sell it for actual money! Include your link on all of that promotional material, and in the eBook or report itself, and blog traffic will roll in.
2. Offer to write expert columns in offline traditional publications, and include a link to your blog in the offer. Even if they don't take you up on the offer, they may reference a blog post of yours in an article by one of their regular contributors.
3. Encourage your readers to subscribe to your blog via RSS.
4. Collect email addresses from your readers - even if you have to bribe then with a free coopy of your eBook or white paper to get them - and offer an email update service, so they can be notified when you have made a new post.
5. Start blogs on platforms like Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, and Xanga. Post summary versions of your best blog posts there at least once a month, and in between those summary posts, post a linklove post linking to all your new blog posts on your main blog for the month, plus all the summary posts on the other blogs in your blog network.

And it doesn't end there. Marketing and promotion are a constant activity in any business, and generally you should plan to spend at least a third of your time on marketing and promotion - and make that half your time if you don't have a product or service to deliver.

Don't just social bookmark your blog posts (on the sites which allow such a thing) - social bookmark your articles about your blog posts, your Hubs and lenses and Multiply pages, every profile which contains a link to your blog, and any blog post you find elsewhere which is linking back to your blog.

A note about links back to your blog - the anchor text is crucial. Do some keyword research to find out what searches people are doing on your topic. Choose the best half a dozen search phrases, and make sure that any link you create to your blog uses some of those words as the anchor text. So, for example, I wouldn't put "Click here to read my blog" as a link to my blog - I would put "Click here to find out about the lighter side of debt consolidation refinancing".

Blog traffic really comes down to backlinks. Assuming you have done your job well in creating good quality, readable content, your success as a blogger will come down to how many backlinks you can get, because those backlinks will lift your blog posts up the search engine listings for your chosen keywords. Search engine traffic is the Holy Grail of blog traffic.

You can build blog traffic without having much visiblity on the search engines, but the process is slow and involves building very strong relationships with other bloggers in your niche. If you want to create blog traffic fast, you need to woo the search engines.

The study of how to get traffic to your blog is really a life's work. There is so much to learn, and new resources are becoming available every day. The secret to blog traffic is really no secret at all - it's the age-old challenge for any business. Marketing and promotion. It's easy enough to say, runs off the tongue without much effort, but you will actually have to exert quite a bit of effort if you want to attract a decent amount of blog traffic in a reasonable timeframe.