As a follow up to the “…Traffic is hard to generate” post, here are the other suggestions made by the other contributors, in no particular order:

1. Dennis Coughlin
   Find the best blogs on your niche and contact the authors. Introduce yourself and send a link of your blog. This might help them to discover your blog, read it and possibly link to it.
2. Guido
   Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums.
3. Daniel
   A simple tip that will probably boost your page views: install a translator plugin. I decided to use a paid plugin for this, but if I am not wrong there are some free ones as well. The translation is not very good, as you can imagine, but it helps to attract readers that are not fluent in English.
4. Kat
   I’ve recently gotten involved with several “MySpace-like” community sites that focus on my target audience. I share my thoughts in their forums, post intros to my real blog on their system blog and I’ve even created a group for my specific niche. It’s been very, very successful for me.
5. Tillerman
   Be the first to write a post about the ‘Top Ten Blogs’ in your niche. The post will rank highly in any general search for blogs in your niche and other bloggers in your niche write about the post and link to it.
6. Jester
   Leave comments on other blogs. If you’re already reading them, it takes
   just a couple of seconds to leave a message agreeing or disagreeing
   with the author, you get to leave a link to your site, and you will almost
   ALWAYS get traffic from your comments.
7. Sridhar Katakam
   Keep track of blogs and leave comments on them. How do you know which blogs to keep track of in the first place? Add the MyBlogLog widget/code to your blog. When you notice a MyBlogLog user visiting your blog, visit that person’s in turn.
8. Grant Gerver
   Try to be polemic. I write obsessively about all-things political from the left-wing perspective in the form of humorous, sarcastic one-liners.
9. Megan Taylor
   Participate in conversations on related blogs. Start conversations on your own blog. Don’t just post about a story and leave it at that, engage your audience.
10. Ian Delaney
    Nothing creates long-term traffic more than value. Making a post along the lines of ‘Evaluated resources for XYZ’ is useful. Useful things get linked to and they get onto del.icio.us, which is far better long-term than a digg front page.
11. KWiz
    Write something controversial. I don’t think it’s good to write something controversial just for the purpose of getting traffic necessarily (especially if it’s only for that purpose and you’re being disingenuous), but it works.
12. Alan Thomas
    Don’t forget your archives. I just posted a roundup of all interviews I did over the past seven months. One of them generated a new link and a big traffic spike from a group of users that look like they will be loyal readers now.
13. Splork
    I’ve had good success writing articles and submitting them to EzineArticles. Articles that have been written from well-researched keyword phrases and accepted by EzineArticles tend to rank very high in Google for that search term. Placing anchor text in the footer of those articles so the reader can visit my relevant website has always increased my site traffic.
14. Eric Atkins
    Create a new design for your website. Not only will it be more attractive to your regular readers, but you can submit it to some CSS gallery showcase sites that feature great designs. This will give you exposure on those sites while generating a lot of traffic and backlinks from those types of sites.
15. Brian Auer
    According to my Google Analytics, about 35% of my traffic comes from other people’s blogs and 25% comes from the forums I’m active with, while search engines provide about 15%. I post comments on other blogs that are related to mine, and I post my site link in my signature at the forums.
16. Brandon Wood
    A simple trick I’ve used to increase traffic to my blog is participate in group writing projects. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now.
17. Engtech
    Community. It’s one word but it is the most important one when it comes to blogging. The only “blog metric” that makes sense is the vibrant community of readers it has. Building a community around your blog will bring you increased traffic, but how do you start? The boilerplate response to building traffic is always “SEO, social networking sites, and commenting on blogs” but it can be simplified to “be part of a community”. The easiest way to seed your blog is with an already existing community. But the only way to do that is to be part of the community yourself.
18. Ramen Junkie
    Newsgroups. I always see a spike when I post a review to a newsgroup.
19. Goerge Manty
    Post 3-5 times a day. Use ping services like pingomatic or setting up wordpress to ping some of the ping services. Engage your readers. Put up polls, ask them questions, give them quizes, free tools, etc. Make them want to come back and tell their friends about you.
20. Andrew Timberlake
    A great tip for generating traffic is off-line by including your url in all your off-line liturature from business cards, letterheads, pamphlets, adverts through in-store signage if applicable. I even have our website on my vehicle.
21. Chris
    Squidoo Lenses are a good way to generate traffic. By using a lense,
    you can generate your own custom “community” of webpages, including some
    of the more popular pages in your “neighborhood.” Including your own
    webpage in such a list is a good way of generating traffic.
22. Inspirationbit
    Well, obviously everyone knows that social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, etc. bring lots of traffic. But I’m now submitting some of my articles to blogg-buzz.com (a digg like site for bloggers), and I always get not a bad traffic from there.
23. Shankar Ganesh
    Just browse around MyBlogLog.com and you will surely get visitors to your blog.
24. Scott Townsend
    Inform search engines and aggregators like Technorati (using the ping functionality) when your blog is updated, this should ensure maximum traffic coming from those sources.
25. Jen Gordon
    I came upon some unexpected traffic when my blog popped up on some css design portals like www.cssmania.com and www.webcreme.com. If you can put some time into the concept behind and design for your blog, I’d recommend submitting your site to a design portal not only for additional traffic but to build an additional community around your site.
26. Nick
    Participating in forums is a great way to get loyal readers. Either link baiting people in your signature or posting great advice and tips will give you high quality traffic, which will result in return visitors.
27. Mark Alves
    Participate in Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers where you can demonstrate your expertise, get associated with relevant keywords and put your URL out there.
28. Kyle
    Simplify. Pay attention to complex issues in your field of work. It may be a big long publication that is hard to wade through or a concept that is hard to grasp. Reference it and make a shorter “for dummies” version with your own lessons learned and relevant tips. When doing this, I have been surprised to find that the simplified post will appear before the more complex version in search results. Perhaps this is why it results in increased traffic; people looking for more help or clarification on the subject will land on your blog.

This post is going to be part of Daily Blog Tip’s February Blog Project; because I think the project and this post are a unique way to share with you, the readers, a behind the scenes look at what goes into creating this, the DYH blog. The topic for this month’s project is Traffic Generation Tips, so I’m going to outline a few of the steps I’ve taken to attract new readers. Since DYH is a relatively new blog, I’ve definitely been working hard to get the word out, and so far I think my efforts have been successful. Here are a few of the marketing methods that I’ve used in the past few months, one or more of which is probably the way that you found yourself here today:

• I read a lot of other blogs. Currently I subscribe to 205 other bogs via RSS feeds, and I keep up with each one of them on a daily basis. I’m always on the look out for new and unique blogs, and I try to diversify what I’m reading as much as possible so that I’m always on top of what’s new and exciting. Since DYH doesn’t really cater to one topic and instead pretty much covers whatever interests me, and what I feel will interest you, I am always looking for unique and interesting things to cover. When I do get inspiration from another blog, I always cite that source along with a TrackBack when available. TrackBacks let the original author know that I used his post for inspiration, and also puts a link to my post in the original post. One benefit of this TrackBacking is that since my blog topics are likely to be similar to the blog topics covered by the source blog, the readership is also likely to be similar.
• DYH is search engine optimized. Though I don’t do as much as I should to optimize for search engines, I try to make sure Google is finding my articles whenever possible. WordPress plugins like Google Sitemaps and Ultimate Tag Warrior help, and I tag each post with appropriate key words so that Google knows what’s on each page, and can direct traffic appropriately.
• I like Digg, and I get lots of my ideas from the site. When I first started out, I used the “Blog This Link” feature built into Digg, though I added all of my own information to the standard post before posting it here. This put a link to my post in the “Who Blogged This?” section of the Digg article, but allowed me to give my own interpretation of the article. It was definitely a valuable resource starting out, though I’m shying away from that feature as DYH grows older.

So there are three of my traffic generation tips, and the ones that I found to be the most valuable when starting out. Chances are you found yourself here through one of the three, so you know first hand that they work. I definitely appreciate the readers that I have, which is why I put together posts like TGI Friday. Be sure to check them out, as it’s my own way of saying thanks for staying and making DYH the blog it is today.

[Daily Blog Tips - Blog Project: Traffic Generation Tips]