For some of you, these quick tips may seem basic, but for our current clients who are just starting out (our blogging newbies), they are an important foundation.

Blogging is ALL the rage right?  That’s what we keep hearing on the news these days.  Heck, it’s even in the movies now with films like Julie & Julia (a blog about a woman who cooked her way through Julia Child’s cook book.  As I tell all of our clients, Blogging is AWESOME … but it also requires you to put in some work if you want it to help your business.

So … I’ve put together some tips to help our blogging newbies so that they don’t have to hunt for tricks and tips all over the place (like I did).  Feel free to add to this list in the comments if you have something else to share with our newbie friends.

Eight Quick Tips to Getting More Traffic to Your Blog (or website)

1. Post often – The most important thing – make sure you have fresh content.  We recommend at least three entries a week.
2. Choose a Creative or Intriguing Title – something that makes people want to click through to read what you wrote.
3. Set up a Google Reader account – start adding other blogs that are similar and some that have nothing to do with what you do. This will help you develop and manage relationships with other bloggers
4. Link to others – by linking to others, you help create a network – getting reciprocal links is even better. You can do this a few ways – you can list in your blogroll or if you read a blog post that you like you can quote from it and give credit where credit is due.
5. Be sure to use tags, keywords or metatags (depending on how your blog is formatted). This is big because when your posts are indexed by search engines, these words are basically what the page is filed under.
6. Allow and use trackbacks – The trackbacks are an important part of the blogging world. They allow other bloggers to know that you quoted a portion of their entry or referenced their blog in some way.
7. Be sure to comment/interact with other blogs – this is what I like to refer to as “leaving breadcrumbs.”  You should try to leave a thought provoking or thoughtful comment to the blogs that you are leaving.  I recommend you start off with leaving at least three comments a day on other blogs.  Be sure to include your website address in the comment form so that your name will become a link to your blog.  The idea is that if you leave comments that pique someone’s interest, they will follow the breadcrumbs back to you and possibly become a subscriber.
8. Create Your Own Blog Space – especially if you are a business, invest in your own domain and house the blog on that domain. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest is you don’t want to spend time/energy on building a blog audience on a free site only to decide down the road that you want your own space and lose those subscribers.  It’s not THAT expensive to get it set up right.  If you need info on this, email us.