Every established blogger knows that there was a time when they experienced a special day in their lives – the launch day of their new blog. The blog launch was great, but it’s very likely that there was only one very loyal reader – the blog owner. Apart from the odd friend or family member coming by – that was about it when it came to readers.

Loyal readers don’t hang on trees, let’s face it there’s plenty of good, valuable and interesting reading on millions of other blogs on just as many topics – so new bloggers have to work at driving loyal readers to their blogs, if they want their blog to be a success.

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

It will help you, if you work this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help 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 don’t have to work quite so hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth – if the content of your blog is good – and of course it is – right!

10 techniques to bring traffic to your blog

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles
A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something of value. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article might 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 a minimum of one new blog post per day.
Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as keeping your blog fresh with daily news or short article style posts. 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 are going to find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog RSS 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 crucial so the more content you can produce during 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 an easy to remember domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world 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. If you can get great keywords worked into your domain name that are easy to remember then you’ve done a great job and will benefit from it!. You may need some help and hints on good domain names, if so this site will help you a great deal – although it’s not a good idea to purchase domain names at this site, but it will help you find and choose a suitable name for your new blog domain.

7. Start commenting on other blogs.
Once you have your pillar articles and smaller, daily fresh articles done 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 frequent commenter and always have something valuable to say, then people will be interested to read more of your work and are most likely to click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts.
A trackback is 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 and they often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because similar to 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 most likely come and read your post as they want to 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.

If you’re not sure how a trackback works – Jack Humphrey of Friday Traffic Report has produced an easy to follow video tutorial on how to do trackbacks in Wordpress, or you can visit the WordPress Codex – although if you are new to blogging this may be a little more difficult to wrap your head around. You may want to install the trackback do follow plugin as well.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog.
One of the most powerful ways to get loyal readers is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog this shows 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.

Comments given on your blog are wonderful to receive. Adding the dofollow plugin to your blog is one way to reward those leaving meaningful and relative comments. But you can also place a link to their last post under their comment as well, using another favourite plugin of ours – CommentLuv – that does this automatically! This is an excellent way to promote comments from your readers.

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. Very often other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy an increase in new readers. To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blog directories
In all honesty this tip probably wont bring a flood of new readers – on the plus side it’’s so easy to do and only takes a moment and is worth the effort. Go to Blog Flux, submit your blog to the appropriate category. You’ll need to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so your blog will be ranked with them – then you’ll see the traffic come in. You will probably get 1-10 incoming readers per day using this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. Every little bit 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 is worthwhile as you’ll be leveraging 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 – so it needs to be good.

How you benefit is through what is called a “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is a signature file where you include one to two sentences about yourself and a link back to your blog. 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 all at once – depending on your niche/blog topic.

1. Write more pillar articles.
All points above will help you to find blog readers however, the techniques listed only work well when you have strong pillar articles 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, bringing in more and more readers.

We hope you enjoyed this list of traffic generating tips, which isn’t comprehensive, but will get a new blogger started on the right foot – finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and ultimately your audience of readers. Without doubt if you put your mind and this starter pack of blog traffic generating tips to work – you’ll soon find the harmony and balance that works for you.

Keep in mind these three words: practice, practice, practice. The more you write to your blog, the more comfortable and in balance you’ll be with your true personality and writing style shining through more and more.