In order to sell anything from your blog you have to have traffic. You need eyes on your material or you stand no chance at earning anything from your hard work. One of the biggest mistakes newbie bloggers make is thinking that all they need to do is write a post and people will come find them. Sadly, that is not the case.

Recent studies have shown that at the end of 2009 there were approximately 109 million websites and over 25 billion web pages on the internet. So, finding a blog post without any search engine optimization is literally like finding a needle in a hay field.

Luckily there are several ways that you can attract visitors to your blog and all it will take a bit of your precious time. The main way I use to get traffic to my blogs is through the method by which I use online content. Writing unique articles and linking to my posts within the article and also in the author’s resource box is sure to bring in some traffic. This can be pretty time consuming as for each topic I write about on my blogs, I also write unique content for 8 other sites, mentioned in this post.

Another amazing method of generating traffic comes from creating Youtube videos. You don’t even need a camera to make Youtube videos if you follow the advice in the video below by Otis Collier. Also if you remember this post you can find out how to place affiliate links inside videos that have already been created.

Chances are that most of the visitors to your blog will be one time visits. Sometimes you can get lucky and that’s all you will need but it’s well documented that it takes at least 6 visits for most people before they are ready to make a purchase from a blog. So, you’re going to need not only repeat visitors but also loyal visitors, the kind that will bookmark your posts and share them in their own networks.
The best method to getting repeat visitors, besides having good quality content, is to build an email list and update your visitors when you have new material to share. Share a weekly or monthly newsletter with tidbits of your information.

Use Aweber to build attractive forms and set up an autoresponder. This way you can automate your list building activity. Also, many list builders have found that giving away some useful information, like an e-book or a free report, is a good way to entice visitors to join your list. Give Aweber a try for FREE TODAY.

There are elements you can add to your blogs to make them stand out and also drive traffic back to your content. Of course, driving traffic is only going to help if you have decent enough content for a visitor to stay and read and possibly make a purchase, if that’s what your blog is geared towards.

The number one element you can add to your blog to drive traffic is video. Making your own video would be ideal but there are tons of already made videos that you can borrow from places such as Youtube, which you can embed into the body of your posts. If you are promoting affiliate products then you can use a cool tool from LinkedTube to place a clickable link within the video you are borrowing. If you’re making your own videos then using LinkedTube is a great way to build backlinks when others share your video.

Adding pictures is another great way to drive some traffic back to your blog. If used properly, the pictures will be indexed inside Google’s image library and when someone finds your image and clicks on it they will be taken to your post. When uploading your images be sure to name them with keywords that you are targeting.

RSS Feeds are another useful tool to pull traffic back to your posts. Read this post to find out just how useful RSS feeds can be to bloggers and publishers.