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Starting a new blog these days is about as easy as booting up your PC in the morning. You just press a button and let your PC do the rest. Many web hosts offer specialized blog hosting services which provide users with pre-installed blog software that is ready to use right away. In other words, when you purchase a specialized blog hosting plan, your first blog post is just minutes away. The difficult part is how to get people to visit your blog. What’s required is an effective marketing strategy that drives more traffic to your blog.

Out of the thousands of blogs that sprout up every day, only some manage to gain the level of popularity that almost every blog owner desires. Popularity, in terms of a blog, refers to the amount of traffic that the blog generates. A blog’s value is determined by its popularity. A blog that contains many interesting and useful articles is of no value if it attracts only a handful of visitors every month.

If you’ve just started a new blog and want to know how to get more readers, or even if you’ve owned one for years but don’t know how to increase the inflow of traffic, following a simple marketing plan can help you achieve the desired results. Here’s how:

Any effective blog marketing campaign would have to be centered around Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The sole purpose of optimizing your blog is to boost your ranking in search engines so that your blog posts or pages show up on the first page of search engine result pages (SERP) for popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Here is a list of SEO activities that play a vital role in boosting your blog’s ranking:

Targeting the right keywords can make a huge difference in the amount of traffic that your blog can generate. Performing keyword analysis before you begin writing a blog post can help you find the right keywords to use in your post. It is also important to place these keywords strategically across your blog so that search engines may find them easily. For instance, using keywords in the title tag, blog post headline, meta description for each post and in the content is absolutely essential to increase the visibility of your blog for targeted keywords and improve your blog’s ranking for those keywords.

Building backlinks for your blog is a sure-fire way to get more people to visit your blog. This can be achieved by submitting your blog to the numerous online directories which will serve the purpose of increasing your blog’s visibility. Make sure to submit your blog to relevant directories (website or RSS feed directories), avoid using automated scripts for this purpose, follow each directory’s guidelines for submissions and provide detailed information about your blog.

Creating press releases to announce a new product or service and posting them on popular PR websites helps create awareness about that product. You can leverage the power of press releases by writing one for your blog posts, highlighting the topic covered and any new findings that the blog post may reveal. This can help drive traffic to your blog through the links contained in the press release. Numerous free press release websites such as betanews.com, prlog.org and betanews.com make it all the more easier for your to submit your press releases online.

Writing content for online article directories is an excellent way to drive more traffic to your blog. You can submit articles written specifically for article directories to websites such as ehow.com, ezinearticles.com, articlesbase.com and others. This allows millions of web users worldwide to view your articles and businesses that are looking for free content can publish these articles on their website. All of this can serve to bring more traffic to your website.

Posting comments on other people’s blogs can enable you to earn quality backlinks for your blog. Participating in discussions on relevant blogs can also help build your reputation and establish you as an authority on certain topics which can result in more people flocking to your blog to find out what you have to say. While posting comments, make sure that they are relevant to topic of the blog post and provide valuable input and your honest opinion rather than commenting aimlessly to try and build backlinks.