You know that a blog is a wonderful way to keep your name out there and to promote your website and thus your business. What you don’t know is how to get the traffic to your blog flowing and flowing well.

There are many does and don’ts when it comes to blogging but rather than going though the entire list you should focus on the more important factors. The following tidbits of information will help you to not only ensure your blog traffic starts, but will also make sure that your blog traffic explodes:

Use the Right Blog Software: This is of utmost importance. When choosing the blog software you want to use you need to consider how you want your comments page to be, your archiving page layout, categorization, sub-pages, the works. While Wordpress and Blogger often do the trick you may want to custom make your blog. A good source of info in that department is OpenSourceCSM.

Host the Blog on Your Domain: By keeping the blog hosted directly on your own domain you are attracting attention, gathering links, gaining some much needed publicity, and increasing your trust and rankings on the SERPS. By not hosting the blog on your own domain and having it on a different primary site other than your own you are really moving backwards. Yes you will be garnishing attention, just not for yourself as much.

Participate in Other’s Blogs: Whatever your interests are be it personal or business you can rest assured that there are others out there who will share your passions. This also goes for your industry. Take some time and conduct a search or two to find some worthwhile blogs and forums that already exist in your industry and see what they are all talking about. Be sure to leave intelligent comments when you can and if there is an opportunity to name drop for yourself then do so. Just be sure you are not coming off like a salesperson.

Write Tags for Two: When you are writing your title tags you need to remember it is more than just keeping them snappy and witty for those who have subscribed to your blog, or that you hope will in the future, but you have to write them in such a way that the search engines will like them as well. The perfect way to accomplish this is by writing the blog post first and the title tag second. In this way you will be able to scour the post to pick out pertinent keywords and phrases that you can then use in the title tag.

Begin with Silence: When you are looking at your blog or anyone else’s and you see a bunch of posts and most of those posts have a big goose egg under the comments section, what do you think? Dead blog or boring post? Whatever the case may be you may judge the blog by the number of comments as this shows interaction and really how popular the blog is. Well that is going to be what people think about your blog as well. To combat this you can disable the comments at first and wait until you have over 100 RSS subscribers or you are getting about 750 unique visits per day and then open up the lines of communicating. This will ultimately lead you to light, but steady activity in the comment department.

Don’t Recycle News or Thoughts: When you are first starting out you need to be more than original with your blog posts. Just because there is a big news story that deals with your industry, it doesn’t mean that you have to be covering it. Remember there will be hundreds, if not thousands of other bloggers who will be covering this very topic and many of them are already well established. Simply covering a news snippet in your own words is not enough. No one will be looking to your blog as a source of the latest news; at least not yet. Stick to all original thoughts and blog posts and wait until you are an authority within your industry before you jump on the bandwagon of news reporting.

Link and Link Again: It is far better to be over nice with your link giving then it is to be considered an under linker, especially in the blogging community. If you do take some thoughts or ideas from another blog be sure to give it honorable mention. Failing to do so will give you a bad reputation as a blogger and will only hurt you in the long run.

Hold off on Advertising: Nobody likes advertising but it has become a way of life online. However, until your blog is well established hold off on the AdSence for crying out loud. If you have no reputation and no following then over advertising will certainly put people off and you risk running off potential subscribers. This is not to say that you can never use AdSence, but you may want to wait just a bit before you do.

Make Your Blog Posts Sexy: Nothing will put a reader to sleep faster than line after line of plain old text. Try breaking up your text a bit with a picture or two. You can also use bullet points, italics, add different fonts, whatever. The point is that you want your blog to be both enjoyable to read and enjoyable to look at. Make the readers enjoy their visit and they will come back again and aging.

Give Them What They Want: Take some time to research what it is that everyone is pondering. What questions are being asked and what answers are being given? You would be surprised at the number of questions that are all over the forum boards that have no solid answers. If you become the authority and a go to place to find answers then you blog will benefit greatly.

Give Them Something Special: People who are into reading blogs love the idea of an open source world. Within your blog you want to give the readers something they would not normally be privy to such as pricing, trade secrets, and even the occasional rumor; so long as it is a harmless one. Just be careful and don’t go overboard. Know your limits before you begin to blog and you will be all set.

Be Consistent: If you want to build a following you need to be consistent with your posting. One post a day is ideal but whatever you start you need to maintain. Being sporadic with your posting will only be viewed by readers as a letdown and you will lose your audience. Perhaps the worst thing to do is to be ultra-consistent for months on end and then go on vacation for two weeks and not post at all. Does this mean that you are chained to your lap top for the entire trip? No, but if you are not going to be posting invite a guest blogger to do so for you while you are away. The end result will be your subscribers getting what they want and you getting a break.

Stick to a Brand: When you set out to create your blog you need to have clear cut goals in place. The first thing you want to accomplish is the building of your brand. If your blog is to be known for a place where readers can find answers to questions they have then don’t break that mold six months into your blogging life. Once you are established it is very hard to change without suffering major repercussions.

Blogging is a great way to get yourself out there but you need to remember it is no longer a secret for Internet gurus only. Everyone it seems is blogging these days both young and old. In order for your blog to make it in the ever filling pool of blogs you have to go about it just right. Using some ingenuity and some tenacity will go a long way in seeing your blog become the blog in the minds of many a reader.