Choose A Niche

This is where you start getting people to your site. There are many options and different people will tell you different tactics. Here’s my top six must-do list:

1. Install the RSS Feed Plug-in for Wordpress and submit your feed to Feedburner

   Feed subscribers are very important to the success of your blog. By installing the feed plugin, all of your feeds will be routed through Feedburner so you can get a somewhat accurate count of your subscribers. I saw somewhat accurate because feed reader counts can be skewed by many factors, including search engine bots.

   Once you are on the Feedburner site, be sure to read up on allowing users to subscribe to your feed via email. There are a ton of ways to optimize and advertise your blog RSS, so be sure to spend some time deciding which methods you would like to try.

2. Register at Technorati, My Blog Log and at least three other blog directory sites

   When you register for these sites, you become part of a community. It really is not about being listed in the directory, but about finding other bloggers in your niche and networking with them. Although you don’t want to spend too much time on these sites, I recommend dedicating a couple of hours a week in your schedule to making friends with other bloggers in your niche via blog directory sites.

3. Add your index page and at least two posts to Stumble Upon

   If you aren’t comfortable doing this under your own Stumble Upon login, create a new one or ask one of your new networking buddies to submit your articles for you. Just be sure this gets done. Stumble Upon can bring a huge influx of traffic to your blog. Because Stumble Upon users can narrow down the topics they surf, some of this traffic is highly targeted and that makes it high quality. Yes, some of these hits are simply empty numbers, but if you can get a few articles regularly Stumbled, you can count on it as a fairly steady source for targeted traffic.

4. Write an article with your new blog linked in the resource box and submit it to EzineArticles.com

   I have an article on Speed Reading that gets front-page Google results because it resides on E-Zine Articles. There area few keys to this. You need to submit content that has not been and will not be published anywhere else. It needs to be well-written, 100% original and exclusively submitted to E-Zine Articles.

   There are other article sites that may work just as well, but I haven’t tried them out for quick results, so I can’t vouch for them. Within a couple of weeks to publishing my articles to E-Zine Articles, my work was syndicated several times and ranked. Before you do this, spend some time on your resource box. Think of it as a mini advertisement for your blog. You only have a few sentences, so make them count.

5. Register for Google Webmaster Tools (it’s free)

   Once you are logged in, add your blog to your dashboard. Be sure to include the XML sitemap created by the Wordpress plugin. This is a much faster way to get your new site indexed than simply submitting it to Google. Though this does not guarantee that your site will be crawled, this method has never failed to get my new sites indexed within the first couple of days - no more than a week.

6. Start commenting on other blogs

   This is the very best way to get 100% targeted traffic. Find some blogs in your niche and get to know them. Read the archives and start commenting on the newer articles. Many bloggers don’t pay much attention to comments on posts older than a month, so don’t waste your time commenting on those. Stick to the new stuff and you’ll soon be noticed.

   Here’s the thing: be useful. If you jump around leaving comments like “Great post!” you are doing nothing but filling space. The way to get noticed (and get clicked) is to contribute something worthwhile to the conversation. Share your opinion, answer a question or find some other way to be sure your comment adds actual value. Spam commenting will never bring positive results.

As I said, there are a million ways to advertise for free, but those six will get you headed in the right direction. You will notice that most of them focus on community. The blogosphere can be a tight community and, at times, hard to break into. If you and your site contribute original content and insights then all it takes is persistence to get noticed.

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