Part 1 of this series looked at setting up your new blog, and getting started. This time I’m going to review the posts I’ve written on getting people to actually visit your site and read what you’ve written.

There are hundreds of ways to achieve this, most free, a lot paid, some slightly unethical and others very unethical, but ultimately the only way to get a sustained number of repeat visitors is to write things that people want to read. Or you can just post nude pictures or amusingly subtitled pictures of cats, but if that’s not your niche you may have to accept that your chances of a million visitors a month are limited.

This has been summarised a thousand times by the expression ‘content is king’, and while I shudder to repeat it again, it is unfortunately true. However, I don’t care how good a writer you are, if you make no effort at any kind of promotion, then it’s unlikely that very many people will ever read your blog – at the last count there were some 200 million competing blogs, and whilst less than half of those may actually be active, that’s still a lot of blogs competing for readers. So while I can’t tell you what to write, I can tell you how to get started with some simple promotion that will help readers to find your blog.

The Technical Side 

There are some relatively simple do-once tasks that can greatly increase your visibility on the internet. These mainly concern getting your blog set up correctly so that your content can be accurately indexed by search engines, which in turn will help human readers to find it.

Sitemaps: One of the easiest things to do is set up a sitemap for your blog. This is a simple file which clearly instructs Google and other search engines how your blog is laid out, and where it can find all of your posts, what their titles are and what they’re keywords are. The search engines will find your content eventually without a sitemap, but with one the posts are indexed much more quickly and accurately. Happily, setting up a sitemap is very easy, and I’ve written posts for both WordPress users and Blogger users.  A 10 minute job in both cases.

Robots.txt: Not essential, but it has been shown to help with increasing traffic from search engines. Essentially it tells the search engines what to ignore from all the files on your webspace, so it can concentrate on the important stuff – your posts. Full details in use robtos.txt to escape supplemental hell.

Permalinks: This is what’s used to create the URL for your individual posts. The WordPress default (weirdly) is to call each post P1, P2 etc. Change your permalinks to something more relevant, like your post title.

Pinging: WordPress users can set up their blog so that it automatically pings the major blog aggregator services like Bloglines, Google Reader etc. every time you post. Ping is King will tell you how to make sure you hit all the right services. Blogger uses will have to go manual for the time being, and can use services like Pingoat or Icerocket.

The Human Side 

Social networking is a dreadful ‘Web 2.0′ term for ‘making friends’, but that’s really all it comes down to. The single best way to start people reading your blog is to go comment on theirs. Virtually all bloggers will check out a comment leavers blog, and if they like it they will come back, and if you’re lucky will link to you from their blog encouraging their readers to visit. From this point, your blog and reputation will begin to spread.

So how do you find these blogs to visit? Here’s some ideas:

Socialise:  There are a huge range of ‘social networking’ sites out there, and I list some of them at Get Sociable, including linking to my profiles on each. Explore them, join the ones you like the look of, and from there you will start finding bloggers writing about things you’re interested in.

Link: When you find a new blog you like, write about them. It doesn’t matter if you’ve no readers (as far as you know), but other bloggers will notice links, and will quite often reciprocate. Your links will appear in their comments, and can attract other traffic as well as being a valid backlink to your blog – link, link and link again, you’ll be amazed at how well it works. Link to this post and I’ll prove it

Stumble!: Although it’s mentioned in the socialise link above, StumbleUpon is so good it needs to be mentioned again. If you’ve never used it, you will find it an essential tool for finding new reading material and getting visitors to your own site. My guide to being a good stumbler should get you started.

Promotion and Guest Blogging: When a blog gives you the chance to showcase your best post, or write a guest post for them, take them up on it!

There is one last thing to bear in mind regards traffic building, and I’m afraid it is double edged – the quality of your blog will largely determine the level of traffic you receive. The above tips will get your name out there, and there’s plenty more other things you can do, but ultimately it’s down to what you write. That said, you won’t know until you try, so don’t hide behind the excuse of ‘I can’t write’ ; have a go, and give it some time and you may just surprise yourself.