If you’re here reading this article, you probably already have a blog. Maybe you hardly get any traffic or perhaps you get a decent amount but could always use more. I know I’d like to increase traffic to my blog. More traffic means more eyeballs means more money. I’d like to share with you what’s worked for me based on my analytics data.

1. Write a how-to article. People on the web are always looking for information. When you provide that information, at some point, someone will be looking for it. Perhaps not right away, but eventually you’ll start to see some traffic there. To this day, I still get traffic on this Ruby On Rails article I wrote. It wasn’t even an in depth article, but had I had this article when I was setting it up, it would have saved me personally tons of time.
2. Social bookmarking websites. The idea of these sites are you find something interesting and you share it with other members of the site. I personally like StumbleUpon and Reddit. The key here is to tag your page really well. Try to come up with as many tags as you can that are pertinent to your subject or article. A good way to get the right tags is to see what other people are doing with similar content. Don’t be a tool and submit tags that are not relevant to your content. Not only are you wasting your audiences’ time, you are also wasting your bandwidth needlessly. If your site visitors were mislead to your site, they probably won’t stick around anyways.
3. Twitter your new posts. Twitter is a new social phenomenon which I’ve written about before. I see many marketers, evangelists and e-preneurs shamelessly plugging their new articles on Twitter and it seems to work for these people. I’ve chosen for various reasons not to do that, but to each his own.
4. Link from all your other online accounts. It is not uncommon for web savvy people to have accounts on many sites including some photo sharing community like Flickr, or video sharing site like Youtube and maybe a review site like Yelp. The idea here is to provide a link back to your website in your profile OR in the description of each individual content. Examples of this include one of my YouTube videos which has a link back to my site in the description and a Flickr photo of Tim Ferris and I at SXSW. This is just to give you an idea. Obviously you can get more creative with this, but you see where I’m going.
5. Comment on other people’s blogs. Chances are if you have a blog, you are probably reading other people’s blogs. If an article was interesting and thought provoking, and you had an opinion on it, you should just leave a comment. Don’t be lame and say something like – cool article, great, or awesome. That’s useless and unproductive. If you can leave a thought provoking comment or steer the discussion in a new direction, perhaps people will wonder what this person is about and check out your site provided you leave your URL.