So you have started your own blog and filled with with great content. You sit back and wait for everyone to flock to your website and read what you have written. Right ? Wrong. Unless you happen to be a very well-known personality and everyone's dying to know what you have to say, or you say something incredibly outrageous or funny, nobody cares.

Some people have advised trying to get yourself noticed by search engines so that you can get people to come to your site. I think it should be the other way around. Get people to come to your site and eventually, the search engines will find you. You want to engage people, not machines.

So here are some things you can try when you are first starting out.

1. Email all your friends and tell them about your new website / blog. Get them to come and visit, give comments, and send your website address out to a few more of their friends. You can just add your blog address to the signature section of your email.

2. Join a forum or group and start taking part in discussions. Give constructive comments. Don't just say things like " please come and visit me." Eventually, people will come to recognise you and visit your blog to see what it is all about.

3. Visit other people's blogs and leave comments. Make it relevant to their blogs. The focus is about them, not you. There will be those who reciprocate and come to visit you.

4. Add links of blogs / websites that you like. The owners may then want to swop links with you and put your link up on their websites.

5. Submit your blog's URL to search directories so people looking for blogs on a particular topic can find you.

6. Write articles with useful information and submit them to ezines. People with more interest in the topics you write about will come and visit your blog. Make sure you remember to write something in your author resource box that will attract people to click through to your site. Offering a free gift helps, I'm told. I tested it and there was a slight increase in the number of people who clicked to my site. But the article had to be reasonably well-received to begin with.

7. You can pay for your blog or website to be reviewed though I have my doubts about how accurate the review will be. Afterall, if someone is going to pay me $100 to review their site, I will be highly likely to say something nice about them. Likewise, if I am going to pay someone to say something about me, he had better find something good to say and encourage people to come by my blog !

8. You can pay for pay-per-click ads like those offered by Google or Yahoo. In theory, it should be a reasonable cost because you will only be charged when those who are interested click your ad. The costs for trying to secure certain words may raise the costs of this method though.

9. You can just pay a standard fee like $25 a month for someone to allow you to put your website ad up on their websites.

There! A whole list of ways to get people to come and visit your site!