Advertising is something that has been standardized for promoting something, however today I want to explore the free, and often more effective, means of promoting your blog and increasing traffic.

1. Go to about 10 to 20 different small blogs each day (not big ones because your comments are lost in a sea of comments and will never be seen, + good quality comments are more likely to be noticed on smaller blogs) and post comments. Don’t post a link though because then its obvious that your promoting it, besides your name is already a link.

2. Negotiate with other blogs to guest-write an article for them in exchange for being allowed to put links back to your site. Some sites will offer to interview you to give them more content on your site, which in exchange routes some of their traffic to your site. This can be a huge help to blogs just starting out when your friends with owners of other sites that get 3,000 + hits a day.

3. Get indexed in all the major search engines. Google is and will most likely be your biggest traffic-maker on your site, and while there are exceptions for certain niches, it’s generally true. In my personal experiences I’ve found that sites like Yahoo and Msn provide some traffic to a certain extent, but Google provide numbers that are exponentially higher. When working on SEO for your site, different search engines use different methods of checking your site. It’s usually in your best interest to design with Google’s method in mind. To increase search terms that you fall under you can try to include certain keywords in your posts that related to your topic.

4. Register at all the top blogging sites like Technorati and Digg. I’ve personally found StumbleUpon to be the biggest help so far. While none of my posts were good enough to earn any decent status on Digg or Technorati to earn me any decent traffic, sites like StumbleUpon which are more like indexes help get a lot of traffic for smaller blogs. For example, in the first week of my blog I had about 20 unique visitors everyday. One of my visitors was an influential Stumble Upon user and I managed to get 263 views from his referral link in a single day. Now some people might argue that it’s just a temporary spurt of traffic and that it has no lasting impact. I however disagree seeing as there’s a small percentage of people who visit your site that will bookmark you and visit again. This spurt of traffic did just that as since then I’ve gotten around 65 visitors a day (although this lowered seeing as I haven’t written new content lately).

Just as fast as you can gain traffic, you can lose it just as fast. If your readers discover that you haven’t updated your blog in 3 days many will give up on you and never return. It all comes back to having a lot of content. Content is the reason why everyone comes to your blog. People come back to your blog to see more of your content. If you’ve written a lot of articles, you can slack a bit on making new content since your old posts serve as a buffer of sorts for your readers to read through first. However if you’ve just started there’s nothing really for your reader to gain from your site, then he/she will leave, possibly never coming back. By having more content you also expand the range of keywords your posts fall under, therefore increasing the chances of your site showing up on more search terms in search engines.

Have you experienced any means of promoting your blogs that were not listed here? Please feel free to share them below and I might come back to this article later and include them.