Many new bloggers start a blog but get easily discouraged because they have no readers reading it. Well, the readers can't read your blog, if they can't it. They also won't read it, if it's not something they want to read.

My biggest tip I will give here is, give your readers something they want to read. If you write a post that people enjoy reading, they are going to reward you by coming back. Never forget that your readers are real people, make your posts conversational. When you are blogging, remember to keep each post to one topic only and include keyword rich words in your title. Be sure to post to your blog often. Search engines love blogs and if you are posting daily, your blog is going to be indexed by the engines even faster and more frequently.

My next tip, if you are looking for really large amounts of traffic, I would like to suggest optimizing your posts for the search engine. You will want to throw a little SEO into your postings. You can do this easily by doing the following:

1. Use your primary keywords in the title of your post

2. Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post

3. Use your keywords in your anchor text of links in the body of your posts

If you follow those three steps above, you have a better chance of your posts being properly indexed by the search engines. This means more traffic for you.

My next tip, submit your blog to as many directories as possible. If you haven't done so, make sure your blog has a RSS feed. If you are using Wordpress, it will create a feed for you. If you don't know much about feeds, visit http://www.feedburner.com. You can submit your blog url and it will give you a RSS feed address to use. I use Feedburner with my blogs hosted on Blogger. When submitting your blog and RSS feed to directories, make sure you try to submit to the big directories like Technorati, Yahoo, DMOZ, MSN, etc. Here is a large list of blog directories you can submit to:

http://www.toprankresults.com/blog-submit-list.htm

My next tip, add a option to subscribe to your blog so your reader is updated by email when you make a new post. This is a great way to get readers to come back to your site. I use a service from FeedBlitz. You can signup for a free account at Feedblitz, then login to your account and grab some code to place into your blog template. In return, you are able to capture your subscribers names and email addresses. When you update your blog, all your readers will get an email letting them know. Don't pass up this way to bring traffic to you.

My next tip, create inbound links to your blog. You can do this easily by visiting other blogs and posting comments. You can trackback to other's blogs in your posts. If you have other blogs or websites, link to your blog within those. Basically, post your link to as many places as you can.

My last tip, ping ping ping. Make sure to ping your blog to as many as the services as you can. I use a free service at Pingomatic http://pingomatic.com/. At Pingomatic you can type your blog url, then select the service you want to ping. They have about 20 services you can select. This saves a ton of time because you can ping all the selected services at the same time.