Once you have set up your blog and posted content on it then your main focus becomes on getting people to read it. Keep in mind that you’re not reinventing the wheel here… use these proven methods of getting traffic to your blog.

1. Facebook is one of your best choices for sending traffic to your blog. You can set up a new page in 5-10 minutes and it’s simple and it’s free. But this isn’t the best part.

Once someone is a fan of your Facebook page, then you can set up automatic updates between your blog and Facebook page so that fans will be the first to see when new posts are added to your blog.

2. Start a Twitter account. Everyone and their mother seem to have joined Twitter and you should too. Set up an account exclusively for your blog. It only takes about 5 minutes to set up a Twitter account and then you can start sending out some interesting tweets.

You can set up automatic scheduling of tweets to make this much easier for you.

Like with Facebook, you can also automatically update your Twitter followers whenever you add a new post to your blog. Ask others to retweet you so you have access to their followers as well.

Continue to build your following, tweet interesting stuff, and be consistent with your tweets.

3. Utilize forum signatures. I’ll assume that you’re blogging about something you absolutely love. So you should be a member of a forum that talks about whatever this specific topic is. Be absolutely sure to utilize your signature on these forums. Place information about your blog into the signature line and use a catchy description so that people might actually click on it.

4. Social Networking, RSS feeds and Blog Directories are next.
People don’t normally just randomly stumble onto a new blog by accident and that’s why you should add all of these buttons to your blog. Not just for decorative purposes, but to give readers an easy way of sharing posts that they love.

Finally, be sure to list your blog in the biggest directories. Just Google ‘Blog Directories’ to get a list of where you can list your blog.

5. Comment on other blogs that are within the same niche as yours. Do this with popular blogs and add useful comments. Don’t just go onto a random blog and comment with “Please visit my blog” because that’s just flat out rude. Leave only helpful comments that add to the conversation and always include your blog link in the blog’s website field. I also recommend that you use trackable links so that you can know which sites are sending you the most traffic.

6. Find out if any blogs allow guest posting and then contact the owner to see about getting it set up. Guest posting is extremely powerful and most web owners are willing to allow them. These posts must be only the highest quality though.

If you want an even greater chance of them saying yes, attach the proposed post to the email. If they say no, then it’s probably due to the topic. You should always ask why and hope they give you an answer. Either way, you can use that post for another submission or even add it to your own blog.

7. Ezines are still a great way of driving free traffic to your blog. People who search for information on Google often find themselves on an Ezine so why not try and let that article be yours?

Include your blog URL in the resource box to get more free traffic. Sometimes you will find your article being posted on someone else’s website which will also land you more traffic and a free backlink.