There are several ways to get traffic to a blog. The easiest way is to have a good ping list. Every time you publish a post to your site, your ping list gets notified that you have added new content, and you get spiders visiting your site and indexing the new post. That’s one of the great things about blogs.

It’s important to update your blog regularly. Posting every day is a great goal. You will get more traffic if you post every day than if you post once a week or even every few days.

Once you have published your post and the ping list is notified, what else can you do? If your post is well-written and contains information that others would find interesting or useful, you can submit your post to various social bookmarking sites.

There are social bookmarking sites for different topics. Digg focuses on news. MarkTD and PlugIM focus on internet marketing topic. There are many social bookmarking sites to choose from.

Try submitting your posts to various social bookmarking sites. Don’t submit every post to the same sites. You can also place bookmarklets on the bottom of your post so readers can vote for your article at the social bookmarking sites. Perhaps you have noticed sites that have Digg or PlugIM (such as this one) right on the post.

Get Traffic with Article Syndication

Writing articles and syndicating them to article directories is a powerful technique. Write the article (or have it written for you), post it to your site, and wait a few days for the search engines to find it.

Then submit the article to some article directories, such as EzineArticles.com and ArticleAlley.com. Or, you can use a service like Submit Your Article and have your article submitted to hundreds of directories.

For better results submit your article with various changes made so each one is unique. It only takes a few minutes to make some simple changes. Then submit a unique article to each article directory.

Submit Your Article recently introduced a new tool that makes it possible to alter your original article in less than 20 minutes. You type in your article, select the article leveraging tool, and in a short time you have a multitude of various articles. Search engines love original content.

As search engine algorithms get more advanced they are penalizing duplicate content. This tool (or if you do it by hand on your own) creates a bunch of original articles that you can submit to the article directories.

Tracking and Statistics

If your hosting service uses Cpanel then a traffic and statistics package comes with your blog. Log into your Cpanel, click on the Web Stats icon, and you are taken to a page with several statistics options.

Awstats and Webalizer are two very popular programs that tell you how much traffic is coming to your site each day. Awstats tells you where they came from, what pages they looked at, and what they clicked to leave your site, how long visitors are staying on your site, keywords that people used to find your site, and much more.

Webalizer tells you the average visits per day on the main screen. If you click the month another screen opens up with lots of information in graphs and charts.

It’s not necessary to spend hours looking at this information, but spending a few minutes each week with these tools can help you know what you need to focus on to get more traffic and if you need to make changes so people stay longer.

For instance, if a large percentage of visitors are viewing your post on setting up a salt water aquarium, perhaps you could write a few more posts about that popular topic. Maybe it is an indication that there is a need for an e-book or video tutorial on setting up salt water aquariums.

Conclusion

These are some of the basics for getting more Web site traffic to your blog. Pinging, writing articles and submitting them to article directories, social bookmarking, social networking, and checking your traffic statistics are basically free, requiring only your time.

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