Driving traffic to your blog is the most important thing you can do to make sure your site is a success. If no one reads your blog there's no way for you to make money from the site.



Let's cover 4 ways to drive traffic that involve social networking.

Forums

This is one of the most basic ideas to drive traffic to your site, luckily it's also works really well.

Find a related forum by searching for forum + your niche. This should bring up a good list of places people are talking about your topic.

Go to the site, fill in a simple signature that includes your site in a link using keyword anchor text.

Now go into community and contribute. That means get into conversation, ask questions, answer questions. Each time you contribute to the forum you signature will show at the bottom of your post, giving you a backlink to your site, as well as community members a way to check out your site.

Blog Directories

Two of the biggest blog directories are blogcatalog and mybloglog. These sites are basically directories of blogs. You can go and add your blog, in fact, you can add as many blogs as you have.

To get the best return on this type of site you need to get involved in the community aspect of these sites. Look at other blogs, comment on other people's pages, add friends to your profile. The more you put yourself out there in these communities the more people will stop by your page, and your blog.

Stumble Upon

Stumble Upon is basically a bookmarking site. This site is very powerful however because of the way it is built. You can quickly and easily gain a LOT of traffic by using Stumble Upon.

This site was not created to market your site, so remember that when you are stumbling. Make sure you take some time to stumble through other people's sites as well. Id' say it is wise to stumble at least 5 pages for every one of your pages you give the thumbs up to.

Claim Your Blog at Technorati

Technorati is a power house of a site. It is a large index of blogs. People go there to find blogs about a specific topic. Often times the tag pages from technorati will show up in the Google search results for any given keyword.

It's a pretty simple process, just go in and claim your blog. You will be asked to put a bit of code on your site, the instructions are given when you claim your blog.

Once your blog has been claimed you will begin to gain status in the community by driving traffic to your blog. The higher your technorati score the better, and the more people who will see your blog.

There are so many ways you can drive traffic to your blog. If you are using web marketing to sell products or make money you are going to have to know how to drive traffic to your site.

If you take action on any one of these techniques on a consistent basis you will begin to see an increase in your traffic levels. With more traffic generally comes more sales.