I am now 62 posts into my life as a blogger. Some weeks have been more productive than others but overall I am happy with my publishing frequency. If you have a blog which you want people to read then it is not always enough to write superb posts. In order to get people to view your blog you need to market yourself, otherwise people will not find your blog. So far I have not found any method that gives me loads of visitors without me having to do anything, however, some ways work better than others. Here are my tips.
The most basic tip of all is to keep writing. If you do not update your blog frequently, people will not visit your blog frequently. It is also very important to establish some contacts. Go to other blogs and comment on their posts. If you appreciate a particular blog you can add a link to it on your blog and then ask them if they want to do the same. Commenting a lot on other blogs also spreads your name and in consequence makes people interested in what you have to say.
The next step is to get your blog indexed by search engines and blog catalogues. The easiest way to do this is to use a pinging service. Personally I use Pingoat and Ping-o-matic. Both of these pinging services announce your new posts to a few dozen search engines and blog catalogues.
If you have accomplished the basics above (not a trivial feat), then you can start to look at different web-applications that will help you build traffic. If you have a blog in English, some time to spend, and want to build traffic, then my best tip is to sign up for Blogexplosion. The concept is simple, if you read other peoples' blogs then they will read your blog. At blogexplosion you get 0.5 visitors for every 30s visit you make on a blog. Every now and then you also get so called "mystery credits", which is just a kind of bonus. So you really get a little bit more than 0.5 visitors on your blog for every 30s visit to another blog. There are various similar services, including Blogmad and Blogadvance, but Blogexplosion has worked best for me so far.
It is nice to be able to see how traffic builds on your new blog, and there are some neat ways of visualizing the trends. For basic stats and trends (see picture above) I use Blogflux topsites, which generates charts showing how many visitors I have had for the last month. Blogflux mapstats (see picture below) is another excellent service which allows you to see the location of the people who have visited your blog as well as the site from which they came, or alternatively, what they put into their search engine to find you. ClustrMaps (see picture far above) is a similar service which has the extra positive aspect of accumulating statistics – it does not throw away all the stats every day. However, ClustrMaps does not give you as much details as Blogflux mapstats, so it is up to you to decide.
There are of course countless additional tips, however, so far these have served me the best.
Surprised you don't mention Google Analytics, which tells you how many hits you get on a given date, where they come from in the world, how they found your blog... it provides charts, maps, trending, all sorts of cool stuff.
SvaraRaderaAh, fair enough, and have fun with it! ;)
SvaraRaderaAll I can say that more than 50% of my visitors are from overseas, so the market is definetly bigger, and the potential is thus also bigger. Then again, some swedes may become less interested.
SvaraRaderaMy own average is about 30, on good days I get 50, on bad days less than 20. Then again I don't write very often, I try to have at least one post every week, but I don't always attain that goal. In other words, 150 visitors would definetly be a teriffic result.
Since I started blogging in English I'm actually receiving less hits from search engines than on my Swedish blog. I would conjecture this is because the competition is MUCH smaller in Swedish than English. If someone searches for information about a specific topic that I have written about in Swedish, my blog is much more likely to be among the top hits than if they search for something in English, because there simply is so much English content to compete with.
SvaraRaderaI still have roughly the same number of returning visitors though and I'm hoping that will rise as I participate in more blog carnivals and the like.
By the way Anders, when you say you have a certain number of visitors, do you mean unique visitors or total, and which counter do you use? I used several different counters on my Swedish site and they all gave different numbers! These days I only use google analytics, it's just easier that way.
SvaraRaderaParticipating in forum will also get some traffic.
SvaraRaderaIt is true have used this method and works great. always use your blog home page to link to the hight PR.
SvaraRadera