I’ll be the first to admit that building traffic to my sites is something I should work harder on. I know what to do, but making the time to do it is often another matter. Very, very bad of me since I’d do far better and earn more with more traffic.

I’ve long since slipped on one of my big goals, which was to comment more often on other blogs. Other blogs can be a great traffic source, especially if you post relevant and insightful comments. It really can bring in traffic.

The trick is standing out from the crowd. Commenting on popular blogs means your comments get seen by more people, but it also means you have more people commenting before you have even seen the latest post.

Be controversial.

Being controversial can also bring good traffic, especially if it’s on a current hot topic. No one cares if you think goldfish are better than neon tetras. But if you have a strong opinion on something popular, whether it be the latest Harry Potter (book or movie), the current field of candidates for the next Presidential nominations, current events in your field and so forth, you can encourage traffic, comments and links.

Master the social bookmark sites.

A part of this is to make your site friendly to social bookmarks. If you blog, have links on every post for people to add your site to their preferred social bookmarking website. You can do this on non-blog pages as well.

You should participate as well. Do not just bookmark your own websites; people can tell you’re doing that. Take the time to Digg, Stumble or whatever other sites you use other websites. Make friends and look at what they’re reading. Bookmark sites and pages just because you enjoyed them. Comment.

All of this means that if you do bookmark your own pages you at least have something of a reputation as someone who is participating, rather than only gaming the system.

Use Technorati tags on your blog posts. Technorati tags help your posts be found on Technorati. Make sure you claim your blog on Technorati as well. It’s not the biggest source of traffic, but I do see some.

Post often.

If you only post weekly, you need to really shine in that one post. Most people like to read things on a blog regularly, not just occasionally. Posts don’t need to be long. They need to be attractive to your readers, whether they entertain or inform.

Write occasional detailed posts. Not every post of yours has to be pages long. Writing posts that cover a particular topic in detail can encourage people to come back to your blog regularly and to think of it as a resource.

Make sure your blog is search engine friendly.

If you’re using Wordpress, take advantage of the ability to decide how your permalinks should look, rather than using the default numbering system. Under the Options tab you will find a place to change your permalink structure. Give it a custom permalink structure - /%postname%/ is good for most blogs.

Take advantage of the Post Slug if you use Wordpress as well. This allows you to decide what the postname in the permalink will be, so it does not have to be the same as the post title. You can make your link better for the search engines, while your title is planned to get attention when seen in the results.

Make it easy to subscribe to your blog.

Having subscribers means you have people that may visit your blog regularly, perhaps even every time you post. You don’t want to make life difficult for your loyal readers. Feedburner makes it easy and you can track your stats through them, or you can set up the links on your own.

If you have traffic try to keep it.

This can be very difficult, but if you find you are getting a surge of traffic, try to figure out how to keep these people coming back. Make subscribing easy, have other interesting content linked from the page currently generating interest.

Technorati Tags: blogs, building traffic