Blogging is an enjoyable habit especially for those who love writing and expressing themselves to others. Many people even make a living out of it. However, gaining profits in writing blogs is not an easy task especially if you are just starting your blogging career. Other than writing relevant content, driving traffic to your website is also essential and it is not an easy task. It takes time and persistence to build online history and gain consistent traffic. No traffic, no money.

To increase traffic to your blog, you have to be effective in your website promotion activities. This may include your blog appearance, SEO, social media promotions and email marketing.

See below:

Blog Appearance

1. Blogging Platform: There are several good and free blogging platforms available online. Most famous platforms are WordPress, Joomla, Blogger and Drupal. WordPress is the most preferred platform by many bloggers and it is also originally designed for blogging. But if you want to put some dynamic functionality like social networking and ecommerce features, you may consider using Joomla and Drupal.On the other hand, it is also possible if you want to create your own blog site from raw. Hence, it will take you more time unlike setting up a site using WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. Also, in using either one of these three options, several modules and plugins are already available for your convenience plus worldwide support communities that are willing to help you out with your platform issues.
2. Color Theme: Your choice of colors is very important for your blog appearance. Through colors, you can trigger different emotions of your readers. Most blogs tend to use light colors for their backgrounds, and dark colors for the texts, (such as White & Black) this makes the content more readable for general users.
3. Navigational Layout: Make your layout navigational. Organize your links and blocks well. Make your recent posts and most famous articles are accessible to your readers. Study and experiment well for your ad positions. Also, putting them in the right places can make your number of click through higher.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

1. Relevant Content for Your Focused Niche: When we say relevant content, it means content that is helpful to readers.The web is continuously being updated every day, where users are continuously looking for good content that relates to them, aim to publish new content on a daily, or weekly biases that will link to your audience.
2. Link Building: The number of back links is essential if you want higher page ranks. Like voting system, search engines will determine your website relevance with the number of link presence you have on the web.. These links can be achieved in various ways, Submitting to bookmarks is an effective link building activity, or by writing guest articles, or even networking on social media websites.
3. Public Relations: Public relations like press release and article submissions can also help you promote your site, increase back links and expose more your website.
4. Ping: Submitting to ping sites like Ping-O-Matic everytime you made changes in your site can trigger the search engines to visit your website and index your new pages.

Social Media Promotions

1. Twitter: Recently, Google started indexing twitter pages. Therefore, whatever you tweet in connection to your website will affect your online presence. Be creative with your tweets, add your keywords and link them to your website. However, re-tweet other helpful posts also to gain more followers.
2. Facebook: Facebook is now the largest social networking site on the web. Everyday billions of users are interacting on this site, which is an enough reason to invest time and promote your websites on Facebook.
3. Other Online Community and Blogging Sites: Aside from Twitter and Facebook, investing time to other blogging sites and online communities like forums and other social networking sites can gain more exposures to your websites. Prevent spamming, post relevant comments that would help others. With this, you are not only promoting your blog, but you are also building relationships to your peer bloggers.
4. Commenting on other blogs: Create a list of blogs that you would read regularly, and which relate to your business. Aim to leave useful comments on articles that are published on these blog, be creative with your comments, by writing comments that would provide extra value to the post and readers.
5. Forums: A good way of building your presence and getting users to your blog, is by using forums. Register with forums within your niche, and answer few questions that the users ask, do this regularly, over time you would build your brand awareness and start to drive traffic to your site. When answering questions, be as helpful as you can, and provide answers that would be effective and helpful to all reading that question.

Email Marketing

1. Pitch Page for Mailing List: Sending emails to people who do not give you any permission to do so is loud and clear spamming. Do not do this. Create a pitch page or pitch block in your website where your readers can submit their email address to subscribe to your newsletters. You can get embed codes for this by using tools like Aweber or FeedBurner.
2. Good Layout and Content: Sending an attractive and corporate looking e-newsletter can prevent your recipients to hit the “spam” button. Be creative with your layout and give them good content. Put links directing to your website. Also, offering some games, rewards or other promotions can be a good call to action to your readers to visit your blog.

Guest Blogging

Last but not the least also, have a presence as a guest blogger on various authority and related sites of your industry. As guest blogging is more than writing a blog post for some other blog, it has got many benefits, which can improve your image as a blogger and also help you promote your own blog by reaching out to communities established by these blogs.