If you are looking for a way to drive traffic to your website, and who isn’t, look to your blog. Blogs are an excellent way to communicate with your target market and invite them to visit your site. Here are some tips you can use to blog for traffic.

• Post on your blog regularly; at least 3 times a week. By updating your blog on a regular basis, you are giving your readers a reason to keep referring back to your blog. If you are providing timely and informative posts, your readers will see you as an expert in your field. They will turn to your blog as a way to seek answers to their questions. Posting regularly also develops a relationship between you and your customer. They will get to know you and trust your opinion.
• By installing a feed burner onto your blog, you will make it easier to keep in contact with your customers. Your readers will be able to subscribe to your blog and choose to have new posts delivered right to their email or computer’s homepage. There are several services to choose from, and you can get a basic service for free. Setting up the service is easy; you simply install a small piece of HTML code onto your blog. This Blogsome blog came with RSS feeds pre-installed.
• You can also opt to have a “blog roll” or list of blogs your readers may find helpful on the side of your page. If you put the link to another blog on your page, ask for a link back to your blog, too. This can help widen your audience, as readers of others’ blogs will see the link to your blog and check it out. Just remember to keep your target market in mind. It doesn’t make sense to trade links with just any blog. We are making an exception to this rule on Winning Blogs, one way links carry more clout, so DO NOT LINK BACK TO WINNING BLOGS on your blog, although links from Ryze, squidoo, social bookmarking sites, or even bookmark this site on your own computer.
• One of the best, and easiest, ways to drive traffic to your website through your blog is to link back to your site as you post. Each time you put a new article on your site, you can write a “teaser” post containing an excerpt of the article and include a “read more” link to the page on your site that features the complete text. Also include links to older articles that become timely again. For instance, you may have put up an article on your site in the summer that explains how to keep kids occupied by creating costumes. When Halloween comes around, don’t forget to link back to that article. You may also want to include links to your opt-in pages or pages. Include your a link to your blog in your Ryze and other forum posts in your signature file.
• Blog Hop. Visit each others blogs, comment on each other’s posts, linking back to your blogs.

As you start practicing these strategies check your page stats and see how many visitors are coming to your site through links placed on your blog. You will get a better idea of what is working and will be able to increase traffic even further.