There are several ways to get traffic to a blog. Making sure you have a good ping list is the first thing you want to do for generating traffic to your blog.

Every time you publish a post to your site, your ping list gets notified that you have added new content. Spiders come and visit your site and index the new post. That's one of the great things about blogs.

It's important to add content to your blog regularly. Posting every day is a great goal. You will get more traffic if you post every day than if you post once a week or even every few days.

Once you have published your post and the ping list is notified, what else can you do? If your post is well-written and contains information that others would find interesting or useful, you can submit your post to various social bookmarking sites.

There are social bookmarking sites for different topics. Digg focuses on news. MarkTD and PlugIM focus on internet marketing topics. There are many social bookmarking sites to choose from.

Try submitting your posts to various social bookmarking sites. Don't submit every post to the same sites. You can also place bookmarklets on the bottom of your post so readers can vote for your article at the social bookmarking sites. Perhaps you have noticed sites that have these.

Get Traffic with Article Syndication

Writing articles and syndicating them to article directories is a powerful technique. Write the article (or have it written for you), post it to your site, and wait a few days for the search engines to find it.

Once it has been indexed, submit the article to some article directories, such as EzineArticles.com and ArticleAlley.com. There are also sites on the Internet that you pay a nominal fee to submit your article to hundreds of article directories or ezines.

For better results submit your article with various changes made so each one is unique. It only takes a few minutes to make some simple changes. Then submit a unique article to each article directory. Search engines love original content.

Tracking and Statistics

If your hosting service uses Cpanel then a traffic and statistics package comes with your blog. Log into your Cpanel, click on the Web Stats icon, and you are taken to a page with several statistics options.

Awstats and Webalizer are two very popular programs that tell you how much traffic is coming to your site each day. Awstats tells you where they came from, what pages they looked at, what they clicked to exit your site, how long visitors are staying on your site, keywords that people used to find your site, and much more.

Webalizer tells you the average visits per day on the main screen. If you click the link for any of the months another screen opens up with lots of information in graphs and charts.

It's not necessary to spend hours looking at this information, but spending a few minutes each week with these tools can help you know what you need to focus on to get more traffic and if you need to make changes so people stay longer.

For instance, if a large percentage of visitors are viewing your post on setting up a salt water aquarium, perhaps you could write a few more posts about that popular topic. Maybe it is an indication that there is a need for an e-book or video tutorial on setting up salt water aquariums.

Conclusion

Following the tactics listed in this article will help your traffic grow. Pinging, social bookmarking, writing articles and submitting them to article directories, social networking, and checking your traffic statistics are all basically free. They only require your time.