In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

Tim Ferris, Author of the 4-Hour Work Week explains how he built traffic to his blog on this video filmed at the WordCamp San Francisco.

The blogging tips he covers include; posting frequency, blogging tools, community building, writing good content, build a brand around your blog, work hard to get high quality backlinks, use social media tools and do it all without “killing yourself”.

Blogging Explained

Question: What is Blogging?

Answer: Here is our attempt to explain blogging…

Blogging and social networking are inextricably linked in the sense that both contain certain features and certain properties of one another. Both are aimed at creating a wide movement as far as multimedia interaction is concerned. Though it is true that blogs can be regulated and kept very private, the main purpose of them is to reach out to a number of people, to have a medium to voice your opinion.

Another similarity is that both these concepts have existed on the internet for almost a decade now, but in the initial stages both were rather exclusive of one another. Only in the recent times have they been merged, and their similarity in motives truly recognized. Blogging is essentially done to channel your thoughts out on to an online journal. You also want other people to read what you have written.

This way, you go about coming in touch with people from all over the world who you would not have otherwise known. Similar is the function of social networking. It is a hub where the young and the hearty flock. The chances of getting an audience at such a platform are high.

The origination of the term ‘blog’ is interesting. It was initially called a ‘weblog’ meaning a log or a diary or a journal that helps you to record your thoughts on a day to day basis. In that sense it was rather in its primitive stages and did not turn into an instrument for propaganda immediately. This term was later shortened to blog and this is when free blogging services like Blogger became extremely popular.

As mentioned earlier, blogging today is not restricted to only maintaining a journal. It has truly become a platform where various kinds of people from all walks of life, whether they have the same ideologies or not, conflate, and discuss the matters they think are important to them. Blogging in the twenty first century has come to become an important tool for advertising for people who wish to market their products online, for politicians who wish to sell their ideologies, and reach out, to the masses.

Moreover, creating a blog and maintaining it does not require a fortune. Everybody now has a personal blog and it is all free of cost. Also, one does not need to be a computer engineer or a graphic or web designer in order to embellish their blog.

Unlike a website which operates on a different domain, and for which every single template and tab needs to be designed and created from the scratch, blog sites do not need such knowledge. The blogging service providers have their own inbuilt templates and fonts which have to be chosen by the bloggers as per their own tastes and preferences.

Blogging is an ideal way to make new friends and come in contact with more people than you can do in the actual word, from all quarters of the world. Such diverse people will obviously have differing viewpoints. Therefore, this gives scope for a good deal of discussion and debate with all points of view being taken on board.

Blogs can also be for the sole purpose of making new friends and socializing. That is why social networking sites have picked up the clue and in these times social networking and blogging has, to some extent, been combined, and almost become indistinguishable.

It would be interesting to note that the word ‘blog’ is both a noun and a verb. This leads us to the fact that blogging in some sense also helps get rid of hassles of publishing. Though your work will not come out in print, you know that you can publish your work – your articles, pictures, videos, etc – yourself through you blog.

Therefore, it may be your own personal journal that you wish others to read or you works of art in terms of the stories or articles that you write, or the movies that you make. You can share almost any content with the world at large.

It must also be noted that just like you do not have to be a web designer to create your own blog, you need not be a professional writer, a film maker or a photographer to publish content on your blog. It is just a space for you to indulge in your own small artistic pursuits and share those moments with others. Blogging must therefore be exploited to its full potential.