A blog without readers is pretty much useless. If you’ve been blogging for a while and have only been getting a trickle of viewers to your posts, you need to put a traffic building plan into action. Building traffic is just as an important skill to bloggers as writing quality posts is. Many bloggers are terrific at creating content but don’t know a thing about building traffic. Here is a quick guide to the five most popular (and most effective) traffic building techniques.

1. Get SOCIAL!

Social networking and blogging go hand in hand. Your blog posts can be distributed across social networking channels in many different ways. Sign up for Twitter and tweet about your posts as soon as they are added to your blog. Update your Facebook status with a link to your new blog posts. Submit your stories to Digg.com, Reddit.com and StumbleUpon.com. Remember that in order for social networking to be effective, you need to participate with other people on your list. If you visit their links and respond to their updates, they’ll be likely to do the same for you.

Check out the bottom of this post. See the little icons underneath "Share and Enjoy?" That's the "Sociable" plugin for WordPress. I also employ Hootsuite to automatically update my Twitter status and my Facebook fan page. I'll put together a tutorial on how to use Hootsuite for this purpose if you express an interest.

2.Get SEEN!

Find blogs in your niche and start following their posts. Make sure to add insightful and interesting comments on their posts. Not only will the blog owner take notice and visit your blog, other commenters will visit your blog to get more of your great insight into the topic. Don’t spread yourself too thin with blog commenting, but make it a point to comment on a few related blogs each week.

Not only will you get direct traffic, but you'll also get valuable, relevant backlinks from commenting! Win-win, baby!

3.Get SYNDICATED!

RSS feeds are a way to syndicate your blog’s content so that it is sent to many different people in their own blog readers or on their own sites. Most blogging systems have RSS feeds automatically included but you can add a lot more functionality to your feed by using a free service like FeedBurner.com. With FeedBurner you can add things like sharing the feed via e-mail so it will pull in new readers and encourage previous visitors to come back to the blog again.

See the little icon in the upper righthand corner of the page? That is the RSS feed link for Internet Marketing Muscle. You should click on it

4.Get PUBLISHED!

You may think that by being a blogger you can ignore article marketing. However, you can get a lot  of traffic to your blog by tweaking some of your popular blog posts and adding them to article directories. You can post your popular posts as articles with a link back to your blog in many different article directories. Not only will you get a valuable backlink but your article may also be used by ezine owners which will bring you more traffic.

Plus, your article will get direct traffic from visitors at the article directories. Another win-win. Except this time it's win cubed – you get a backlink, direct traffic, possible syndication, AND you will become known as an expert in your field. But don't call yourself a guru! Let others do that

Oh, yeah, you also get to leverage content you've already written! That's 5 benefits to article marketing! Very powerful stuff.

5.Get BACKLINKS!

Speaking of backlinks, you should work to build backlinks to your blog through several different means. By creating backlinks to your blog, you’ll improve your blog’s ranking in search engine results. You can get lots of traffic from search engines if you are within the first group of search results for your keywords.

Check out 5 x 5 A System for Building Backlinks for a simple backlink-building system.

These five ways of building traffic can be used over and over again to help build traffic to your blog and increase your readership.
 

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Tip #2 — Understand That People Are More Likely To Buy From Those They Trust

You’ve probably noticed that it can be difficult to get new customers to buy from you. Some people simply will not buy from those they’ve never heard of and don’t have a relationship with.  You will usually have to "presell" to them before they will make a purchase. This is especially true since identity theft and fraud have become more prevalent.

The good news is that people will join your list because they view it as a lower risk than making a purchase. All they need to do is hand over their e-mail address and they are "in." This gives you the opportunity to gain their trust and build a relationship that can lead to repeat sales down the road.

Want to learn more about list building? Check out List and Traffic.

ARTICLE MARKETING

Adding articles to article directories is one of the best ways to build traffic and get your website spidered by the search engines. These two critical things will raise your site up the search engine rankings. Plus, by creatively using your resource box, you get a backlink back to your website.

1. Do your keyword research. You can get your site indexed for “long-tail” keywords very quickly by writing articles with juicy keywords that you want to get ranked for in search engines. I’ve seen results for ranking for keywords I’m targeting by submitting articles to directories in as little as under 1 hour at Google. There is really no faster way of getting ranked for target keywords than article marketing. But do your research! In order to get ranked quickly, you’ll have to choose keywords that people would use in a search query but that do not suffer from high competition.
2. Balance your articles for your readers, but keep the search engines in mind. What this means is that you write for people but you also write for search engines, which are definitely not people. Sprinkle in keywords that the search engines (SEs from now on) like but in a readable and natural way. Remember this, though: ALWAYS write solid content for your visitors’ sake. Content is, has always been, and will always be — KING!
3. Don’t waste time submitting your same article to dozens of obscure article directories. There is a temptation to write one article and submit it to every “Tom, Dick, and Harry” article directories. Don’t do it! Make your article submissions exclusive with sites like eZineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleDashboard, and SearchWarp. These are quality article directories with thousands of visitors every day.
4. Make the best Resource Box possible. This is your one chance to get your reader to act; and by “act” I mean to go to your website, fill out a form, buy something. In other words, to take an action that you want them to take.
5. It’s a numbers game, so submit MANY articles. Getting your site indexed by the SEs for highly desirable long-tail keywords is an arduous process that requires dozens of article submissions. Like I said before, make your articles exclusive to a particular directory. So, you’ll have to write a bunch of articles and submit them to article directories. See what happens. Watch your stats!
6. Re-purpose your content. Does this contradict what I’ve just said? No, not really. I am suggesting here that you not only put your article up on an article directory, but that you also put that article up on your own website. Don’t worry about the SEs counting those two nearly-identical articles as duplicate content. It’s only “duplicate content” if it’s on YOUR site more than once. This way, you will be leveraging work you’ve already done to building a long-tail keyword page on your site at the same time as you wrote an article for a directory that the SEs love!
7. Don’t give it all away. What do I mean by this? In your article, give enough information to entice your reader to visit whatever link you reference in your Resource Box. Get them to take your “Most Wanted Action.” In other words, give your readers “interesting but incomplete” information that forces them to take the next step of signing up for your email marketing list.
8. Become an expert. By writing dozens of articles that thousands of people daily have access to makes you an expert in your field. Capitalize on that fact!
9. Research your competition. Look at the most popular articles in a particular directory in your niche and find out what their keywords are, how they write about the topics, how they construct their Resource Box, etc. You want to find out how successful people are submitting articles so that you can mimic their process and make it your own.
10. Set up your article marketing profile. Put up a picture and some interesting facts about yourself. If somebody finds one of your articles, he may try to find you on the article directory website. No picture = very little credibility.

That’s 1-10 of our traffic building tips. We’ll bring items 11-20 next week.

First, the Why. Why do you care about traffic? Whether you write for pure pleasure or you have a website to generate income, you want your voice to be heard, your words to be read, your message to be received. The more people you get to your site, the better your chances of getting your point across. It’s really just that simple.

Of course, if you have a website so that you can sell things (information, services, or physical products like books and music), you want targeted traffic. This means you want visitors to stop by who are ready, willing, and able to buy whatever it is that you’re selling.

In any event, you want to boost your traffic numbers. That’s the Why.

Now, the How. In my last post about building traffic, you saw that there are many ways to get people to visit your site. In fact, that post only mentioned a fraction of ways to reach more people.

However, there is one common thread among all of those methods, and it is this: Anybody who gets to your site got there through a referral.

Read that again. I’ll wait.

Nobody got to your site by randomly typing in letters and numbers in their browser URL address bar. They all got there through a referral.

Now, that referral could have come from a search engine, a link on somebody else’s site, an ad you put up, your signature line in an email you sent, or through a link you put in a resource box in an article you submitted to a directory.

Search engines, by the way, are an attempt to chronicle this referral system in such a way that when you type something in a search form, you will get back a set of results that is most beneficial to you. The web is all about finding information that you can put to use. That’s what the search engines care about.

If you typed in “internet marketing,” for example, in Google, you should get a list of sites that are “authority sites” about internet marketing. You should not get a site about dog training, even if internet marketing is mentioned all throughout the site.

This is why in-context referrals are one of the best sources of traffic. Not only is somebody recommending your site to its visitors, but Google, Yahoo, Bing, and all the other search engines regard (or at least should, in my opinion) that link as more important than a banner, advertisement, or some other referral.

Most of your website traffic will come through the search engines, by the way. But it is those relevant links that pushes your website toward the top of the search engines because the SEs value them more than links in a blogroll or embedded in an ad.

In my next traffic-building post, I’ll get into the specific how-tos for one of the methods mentioned in Traffic Building Ideas. As this series progresses, I will touch on most, if not all, of these traffic-building methods.