A lot of people use blogs to promote their creative work. But how do you get people to see what you’ve done?

We all know getting links and rss readers for your blog are keys to driving steady, reliable traffic. When I was first getting started, I knew that getting featured on digg, del.icio.us, technorati, and other blogs in my niche would be good things, but I had no idea how to do it.

So, here we go beginning bloggers. Here are some essential tools you can use to make it easy to get those links and get steady traffic.

• Comment on blogs within your niche and leave your blog url. I practice this regularly, and I get more traffic than if I just let my name above the comment be the sole link. The trade off is that this looks spammy.
• Set up a feed using FeedBurner. It’s very easy to set up and you let them do the work of adding an “Add to digg”, “Add to Del.icio.us” and “Email This” links to your feed. Plus the free tracking you get is excellent.
• Comment on blogs within your niche and leave your feed url. Rather than drive traffic to your site, drive your subscribers up. If the best reader is a loyal one, get in their reader as fast as you can
• Set up an email subscription on FeedBlitz. A great free email newsletter service that’s easy to set up and integrate on your blog. Plus, your email subscribers count towards your Feedburner subscription count. Not everyone uses RSS yet, so be sure to give options.
• Put your feed and email subscription buttons above the fold. Subscribing to your content should be easy and only one click away.
• Use AddThis to let people subscribe to your rss feed. You give AddThis your feed url, and they create a single button that lets your readers subscribe using their reader of choice.
• Tag your posts on Technorati. Their site shows you how, and there are plugins out there for Wordpress
• Add buttons for Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and many others using AddThis
• Link to other blogs. People watch the incoming links to their blogs, and will probably at least check you out, if not give you a reciprocal link.
• Consume LOTS of information. Fill up your own feed reader with stuff that’s similar to your niche. You’ll have a better idea of what’s going on, and be able to comment on more conversations and link out to more useful entries, which is ultimately good for your readers.
• Write posts that help people. While listed last, this is the most important. If you write posts that are useful or help your readers, they are more likely to want to share it with others.

Tags: blogging, readers, increase

Posted by Classic Jef on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 10:00 am.