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

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you 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 no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could 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 one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. 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 will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog 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 critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be series about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) 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 (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles 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 prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

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

This is a good technique because like 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 likely come and read your post eager 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.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer 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.

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. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all 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’s worthwhile because you simply leverage 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.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). 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 at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars 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 to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

BlogMastermind.com

BlogCatalog.com is running a community fundraising event to raise money for public schools.  Here’s a quote from the BlogCatalog Discussion Forum discussing the challenge:

The purpose of the BlogCatalog Community Fundraising Event is to come together and raise money for our public schools. We have set the goal to $25,000. Hopefully we can blow this goal away and raise far more money. If we do we will have set a precedent that will enable our community to do a bunch of good for other causes in the future.

Donations will be done through a non-profit organization called DonorsChoose.org. Many public schools are short of adequate funding, so they can use whatever help they can get. Use this link if you wish to donate. For more information about the challenge, see the BlogCatalog Discussion Forum.

Message to Google - I’ll give you a real good deal on this site. How about a mere $3 million? Let me know if you’re interested.

The Socializer allows you to easily submit a link to several social bookmarking systems. Instead of having a link to each social bookmarking website, you have a single link to all of them!

Try it out (look for “Social bookmark this page” at the end of each blog entry). Here’s the ExpressionEngine Socializer plugin. And a Social Bookmarking How-to from Pierre Far, who runs Socializer.

Blogs are (or can be):

Personal:
Many blogs are, in essence, intensely personal. People seem to show a lot of their personalities through their blogs. For example, they tend to write about what they’re interested in, their views, their values, their hopes, aspirations, dreams, fears, experiences, etc.
 
Expressive:
I see this as a major reason why blogging is so popular nowadays. With blogging, people get the chance to express themselves, usually through writing, but sometimes through other means as well, including photos, graphics, drawings, cartoons, sounds, etc. It seems that the main driving force behind this aspect of blogging is people have a chance to be heard—to have others read their words and view their sites and perhaps respond via comments.
 
Social:
Bloggers, it would seem, tend to gravitate towards blogs that interest them, or, perhaps, blogs that push them to think about things in new and different ways. Blogging is, in a way, a very social activity with a lot of give and take between participants. This adds to an overall sense of community amongst bloggers.
 
Immediate and fresh:
With the rise in popularity of RSS, various social bookmarking services, etc., updates to blogs can be propagated around the Internet in seconds. People can subscribe to the RSS feeds of blogs they are interested in. The immediacy of blogging has some drawbacks, however. If a person doesn’t update their site on a somewhat regular basis, readers might find their site to be “stale” and might stop visiting. So, most people seem to make the effort to update their sites periodically, sometimes every day. Content that is updated frequently tends to draw people back for more.
 
Viral:
If someone leaves a comment, along with their e-mail address and the URL for their own blog on another person’s blog, someone else might come by and read the submitter’s comment and visit their site. This process where people leave little traces of the existence of their blog all over the place makes the whole process of blogging very viral in nature. I suspect that this is one of the main ways that blogs spread around the Internet.
 
Simple:
In my experience at least, putting together a basic blog is not very difficult, especially with tools that are available from services such as blogger.
 
Expandable/Extensible:
There are powerful free and commercial blog management and publishing tools available for those who want to produce a blog that goes beyond the basics. Some of these tools are very flexible and feature-rich, including my favorite, ExpressionEngine, which is used to run this site.
 
Focused:
Many, though certainly not all, blogs are focused in that they tend to have a general theme. For example, some blogs are focused on knitting; some on being a mom or a dad; some on politics; some on personal experiences; some on sports; some on marketing, etc. The fact that most blogs tend to have at least a general theme means people can seek out blogs that interest them and save those blogs in some way in a list of favorites.
 
Diverse:
There’s an incredible variety of blogs available, which makes the whole process of discovering new and interesting blogs an adventure in and of itself.
 
Inexpensive:
There are several free blogging services out there, including blogger. One can get started with blogging for very little cost.
 
Content Rich:
I think that blogs, by their very nature, tend to encourage people to create content that encourages people to visit regularly. Providing content that others want to see, especially if it is updated regularly, is what keeps people coming back again and again for more.