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The most important way to boost traffic to your blog is to provide something on your blog that people want. Then your readers will want to come back, and they will want to tell their friends - and maybe even to tell a bunch of strangers, via social networking sites. Once that happens, you will be in good shape, and will have a steady stream of visitor.

What do people want on a blog? Maybe it's information they can use, maybe it's humor to lighten their day, maybe it's gossip, maybe it's something that makes your readers feel better about themselves. Maybe it's a glimpse into your life that will make them curious about you. Whatever you provide, you should leave your readers wanting more, so that they will keep on coming back.

You can also market yourself as if your were a brand. For example, one of the most popular blogs is the political blog DailyKos. The creator of the site was very aware of creating a brand, something he did through his choices of color and fonts, his selection of logos, and his easily remembered username.

Even if you are aiming for a more modest amount of traffic, a little marketing savvy will help. If you post on online forums which allow you to have signature lines, put a link to your blog there. If you are a member of online communities that give you a profile page, put a link to your blog there as well.

Perhaps the most important thing you can do to promote your blog is to find other blogs where people have interests similar to your own, and become a regular reader and commenter there.

Tips on specific actions you can take:

- Register your blog at Technorati (www.technorati.com).

- Always use tags (or, in WordPress, categories). They help your readers navigate through your site, and Google loves them! They will help you get your content in a better position on search engine results pages.

- Allow comments on your blog, and encourage lively discussions.

- Set up a blog roll to link to sites that you like. When you link to another site, that site owner is likely to be curious and check you out.

- Post frequently. If your blog appears to be "dead," people will stop checking it for new posts.

- This isn't for everyone, but if you enjoy being controversial, heated arguments do attract a lot of people.

So the basic things to remember are to create content that fills a genuine need, present it in such a way that people will want to come back for more, think of yourself as a brand and use branding techniques to make your blog memorable, and encourge community by commenting on other people's blogs and having lively discussions on your own.

You can also experiment with SEO (search engine optimization) techniques, by using keywords that people use to search in Google and other search engines. Keywords are especially important in your titles, which search engines pay a lot of attention to. Some people will tell you that you should have a certain percentage of keywords in the body of your articles as well, but that doesn't seem to be the case any more. The search engines are now giving more weight to posts that are written naturally, and they might acutally penalize you if you overstuff your posts with keywords. So don't try to trick the search engines. Just give them a little help in finding your posts by putting appropriate keywords in your titles, and by using accurate and specific tags.

Learn more about this author, May Monten.
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