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Driving traffic to your blog is the entire reason why you started in the first place. You began writing with the intention of sharing your thoughts with the world, and perhaps even provide assistance, guidance, or information to those that would come across your well spent efforts.

Today I will share with you the 10 best ways I have come across to expose your blog to a wide variety of readers, and possibly even share your thoughts beyond those in your network.

Commenting

This is an easy one, and perhaps something you already do being that you are probably online reading more than anything else. People who write want to interact more than anything else. Having someone leave commentary on their work provides them another level of interaction with their readers.

Leaving comments allow you to express yourself at one level, but also allows you to leave your name, your website address, and perhaps the title of your last blog post. Now this will vary from blog to blog depending on their commenting system, but it’s worth the effort. Don’t be surprised to see the writer the blog you visited on your site at some point, and if your commentary was worthwhile, perhaps some of the readers will make their over as well.

Link Love

Don’t be afraid to give credit where credit is due. If you’re expanding on an idea that you came across, share where you got the original idea. Providing links to businesses, other bloggers, person’s of interest are all useful and will provide you some benefits in return. It shows that you are aware of others in the blogosphere and that you’re willing to share within the community. By making your readers aware of another site or blogger, they in turn might do the same for you for their readership. It’s not necessarily a guaranteed solution, but it’s good practice as a blogger.

Guest Post

I spoke about guest posting in another post about expertise, but it also allows you to extend the influence of your brand. You may be writing for another person’s blog, but do not doubt that the owner of that blog will promote you with either an announcement at the beginning of the post or at the end. This gives reader the opportunity to see what you’ve done on your own site and perhaps give you some permanent readers.

Social Networks

I have found this to be the most useful of all the tools. Now it’s not appropriate or an accepted practice to simply bombard your blog postings, or advertise your site on a network continuously. You will become an annoyance and probably get blocked by other users. You’ve done two negative things to yourself, you’re not getting exposure on the network and you’re creating a bad name for yourself.

A common ratio to follow is 70% interaction 30% pimp. Thirty percent of the time that you interact online can be the time that you pimp your site, your postings, or your business. On sites like Twitter and FriendFeed you can reach hundreds if not thousands, especially depending on the size of your network. On Facebook you can set up entire Facebook Pages to promote what you do and build a community (fanbase) around what you do.

Ning is also another site that allows you to create a community, and if you look at truly spending the time to interact with the community off your site, then perhaps Ning is a good way for you to cross promote what you do.

Blog Networks

I have not had much success with blog networks, but that’s not to say that you won’t. I belong to a few such as Blog Catalog, but I find too much “spamming” promotion going on and not enough community building. Bloggers simply blast what they do and what they want you to read and quite frankly it turns me off. Rather then build a community of liked minded bloggers, blogging networks can by tricky, and perhaps even selfish, but dig enough and you might find gold.

Blog Networks also allow you to create badges that you can place on your site that will help to share traffic within the network. This can be useful in building a community tied to a specific niche, or looking for your site specifically. If you can find the right group of solid people, they can help you grow, and you help them grow in return.

Well that sums up the first part of a two part series on the 10 best ways to promote your blog. Give these a try and let us know how it has impacted your site. By working together as a blogging community I am sure we can help each other with advice and guidance on some of these issues.

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Continue with the second part here