There are two approaches to making a blog. One is to keep a personal log of your life with little regard to how many people are reading your content. The other approach is to reach as many people as possible for the purpose of delivering your ideas to the world at large and more likely to try and make a profit from your blog.
One of the easiest ways to drive some traffic to your blog is to submit your articles to blog carnivals. This can be done through blogcarnival.com, which is an archive of thousands of carnivals that are categorized and listed according to date of when the next upcoming issue will be posted. Having your article listed on a relevant carnival can drive extra traffic to your blog and most likely those visitors would not have found your blog otherwise. Like anything on the Internet, blog carnivals have varying degrees of quality and traffic that they are capable of delivering to your site. Giving your articles an appropriate yet memorable title will give you greater success when trying to get noticed by carnival operators.
I used blog carnivals quite a bit to jump start the traffic on this site but in the last couple weeks I have been admittedly lax in submitting articles to carnivals and I’ve noticed a bit of a dip in my daily traffic. From this I can gather that not all of the visitors from these carnivals are very valuable to my site, but there is an unseen value here. A key to boosting your search engine rankings is getting other sites to link to yours and I’ve found no easier way of securing external links than with blog carnivals. This is where blog carnivals provide you the opportunity for sustained repeat traffic through search engines.
There are other good aspects of blog carnivals as well. They can be great resources for you in learning new things from some of the really great writers who are out there writing these blogs that are listed in the carnivals. There is a lot of junk in the blogosphere as well and a quality carnival won’t list junk articles so it’s sort of like having a trash filter on whatever topic you are looking for more information on.
It’s also incredibly easy to start your own carnival and get it listed at blogcarnival.com. This approach allows you to snag some traffic from other sites who’s articles you’ve listed without doing any content creation yourself.