The simple truth is that a blog without readers is pretty much useless. If you’ve been blogging for a while and have only been getting a trickle of viewers to your posts, you need to put a traffic building plan into action.

Building traffic is just as an important skill to bloggers as writing quality posts is. Most bloggers are terrific at creating content but don’t know a thing about building traffic. Here is a quick guide to the five most popular (and most effective) traffic building techniques.

Get social!

Social networking and blogging go hand in hand. Your blog posts can be distributed across social networking channels in many different ways. Sign up for Twitter and tweet about your posts as soon as they are added to you blog. Update your Facebook status with a link to you new blog posts. Submit your stories to Digg.com, Reddit.com and StumbleUpon.com. Remember that in order for social networking to be effective, you need to participate with other people on your list. If you visit their links and respond to their updates, they’ll be likely to do the same for you.

Get noticed!

Find blogs in your niche and start following their posts. Make sure to add insightful and interesting comments on their posts. Not only will the blog owner take notice and visit your blog, other commenters will visit your blog to get more of your great insight into the topic. Don’t spread yourself too thin with blog commenting, but make it a point to comment on a few related blogs each week.

Get good use out of your RSS feed!

RSS feeds are a way to syndicate your blog’s content so that it is sent to many different people in their own blog readers or on their own sites. Most blogging systems have RSS feeds automatically included but you
can add a lot more functionality to your feed by using a free service like FeedBurner.com. With FeedBurner you can add things like sharing the feed via e-mail to your feed so it will pull in new readers and encourage
previous visitors to come back to the blog again.

Get articles in directories!

You may think that by being a blogger you can ignore article marketing. However, you can get a lot of traffic to your blog by tweaking some of your popular blog posts and adding them to article directories. You can post your popular posts as articles with a link back to your blog in many different article directories. Not only will you get a valuable backlink but your article may also be used by ezine owners which will bring you
more traffic.

Get backlinking!

Speaking of backlinks, you should work to build backlinks to your blog through several different means. By creating backlinks to your blog, you’ll improve your blog’s ranking in search engine results. You can get
lots of traffic from search engines if you are within the first group of search results for your keywords.

These simple ways of building traffic can be used over and over again to help build traffic to your blog and increase your readership.