In order to attract more visitors, you can employ some of the tips below to drive more traffic to your blog. You may choose to employ some of these tips or all of them but for best results, you have to test and track which tip or tips work best for your blog.

Article marketing
Articles are very useful in driving targeted traffic to your blog. It is also a good way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche if you can provide articles that are well written and well research.

Comment on other blogs in your niche
Take stock of all the major blogs in your niche and follow them closely. Whenever possible, try to post intelligent and helpful comments whenever a post is publish. In this way, you can leverage on these high traffic blogs to attract more readers to your blog.

Guest blogging
Guest blogging is another good way to establish authority and drive traffic to your blog. Many bloggers especially those who have well established blogs are always on the lookout for more content to add on to their blogs. Contact them and offer to guest blog for them, most of them will not reject you if you are able to provide well written and informative content.

Join forums in your niche and participate
Forums are another great channel to get more visitors to your blog. Join and participate actively in well established forums in your niche. You can add a link back to your blog in your signature and profile and if you are well regard in these forums, you will find a lot of targeted traffic coming your way through your postings.

Offline promotion
Besides promoting your blog online, you can also take your blog promotion offline. For example, you can add in your blog URL to your business cards and whenever you distribute them, it is another channel to get more visitors to your blog.

Optimize your blog for the search engines
Learn how to optimize your blog properly for the search engines. You need to understand and learn about on page and off factors which can directly affect your rankings in the search engines. It pays to master some basic SEO skills.

Proactive in networking with fellow bloggers
Build rapport and long term relationships with fellow bloggers in your niche.

Quality Content
Nothing beats quality content when it comes to getting more traffic. Provide more useful and quality content to your visitors and you will find them coming back for more.

Reply to comments
Whenever you receive any comments that are not consider spam, make sure you reply back. Nothing hurts a blog more than having a unresponsive blog owner who do not reply to their readers’ comments.

Submit your blog to blog directories, site directories, RSS feed directories and search engines
Submitting your blogs to these directories and search engines will get the search engines to crawl, index and list your blog quicker and at the same time give you some decent traffic and build some backlinks back to your blog.

Tag your posts
Tags are very useful in getting your blog notice by the search engines. It is also a good way for your site visitors to find your blog easily especially in blog search engines such as Technorati where readers perform searches on blogs based on tags.

While there are many ways to attract visitors and boost your blog’s traffic levels, getting them to return is an entirely different matter. This is something you have to work on if you have trouble getting repeated visitors back to your blog. Other than that, the tips listed above are good ways to drive more traffic to your blog.

Personally for me, I started off participating in forums and gradually moving on to reading posts on blogs. It is from these blogs that I visit which gave me the idea to set up my own family blog. While the initial idea is not to monetize my blog, I gradually discover a whole new world of monetization opportunities with blogs. Well, that is another post for another day. As for why blogs are so popular, I can only speculate on a few possible reasons.

Comment Feature
The ability to leave comments is a big plus. In a way, it sort of becomes a two way communication channel allowing readers to bond with the blog owner.

Content Is Update Regularly
Due to the nature of blogs and the ease in which content can be added just like a personal diary, bloggers tend to post content regularly, giving readers more content and materials to chew on. This in turn drives up readership for blogs, especially certain niches which generate interest and has a huge following.

Conversional nature of posts
Blog posts or content are generally more conversational in nature as compare to content in conventional websites. As most bloggers are not professional writers, bloggers tend to write in their own personal style which many people may find it refreshing and interesting and easy to endear to.

Easy To Add In Content
The way blogging platforms are build is to allow initial non techies like you and me to easily add in content and publish them. Unlike conventional websites, blogging platforms are relatively easy to learn and understand how to use. No longer does one need to understand HTML or other content management systems in order to add or even update content.

Format of content
Blogs entries (posts or content) are pretty easy to read. They are arrange in chronological with the latest entries at the very top of the blog. This formatting style allows people to read the most updated information at first hand instead of having to browse though pages and pages of content as with conventional websites. It is this formatting style which is journalistic in nature that appeals to many people.

Blogs are popular and they are only going to get more and more popular not only as an avenue for people to express themselves and voice out their opinions, blogs are also fast becoming the choice medium for businesses to market their products and services. If you have not start blogging, isn’t it time for you to at the very least experiment and play around with one.

First of all, you must understand there is no best or assure way to market and promote a blog. The degree of success for each method depends on a number of factors such as the niche your blog is in, the quality of your blog and so on. That is why it is important for you to get a good web analytic program to track your traffic sources.

Google provide a good web analytic service called Google Analytics which is free to use and you should really take advantage of it. With Google Analytics, you can track where your traffic is coming from and know which marketing method is bringing in the traffic for you. Discard the ones that bring in the least traffic and focus on the ones that are bringing in the most traffic.

With a good tracking program in place, you can then move on to the various free methods to market your blog. I have listed below some free methods which you can go about marketing your blog:

Article Directories
Submit your best articles to the top few article directories to gain more exposure and traffic and at the same time build some links back to your blog. It is also a good chance for you to establish yourself in a particular niche.

Blog Carnivals
Taking part in blog carnivals is one good way to market and expand you blog’s visibility. Basically a blog carnival is some sort of event in which a number of bloggers will write about a specific topic and then cross promote each other links. This is a very simple and effective way to getting more links and exposure.

Blog Directories
Submitting your blog to blog directories is a good way for people to notice and find your blog. It is also a good way to get your blog indexed quickly.

Comments
Commenting on other people’s blogs is a good way to drive targeted traffic. Just take care to provide quality comments rather than just spam other people’s blogs.

Forums
It actually pays to be active in forums that are related to your blog. By posting quality posts and building up your reputation in these forums, you are establishing yourself as an authority. You also get lots of targeted traffic and you can build a decent list quickly.

Freebies
Create a short report or product and distribute it for free. For example, if you can code and design a wordpress theme, you can offer it for free and let others download and use it in return for a backlink in the footer. Many webmasters and internet marketers are using it to great effect.

Link Requests
Link exchanges are a good way to get quality incoming links for free. However, the success rate is quite low unless your blog is already established and carry some page rank.

Networking
Networking with fellow bloggers in the same niche is another effective way to market and promote your blog, especially when your blog is fairly new. Once you are on friendly terms with them, you can start asking for links exchanges and even blog posts to market and promote your blog.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Traffic from search engines is the best traffic source, basically because it is free. However, to get there, you need to understand on page and off page SEO factors. It takes s a certain level of experiences and expertise before you can understand and master the fundamentals to get free organic traffic from the search engines.

Social Bookmarking
Bookmarking your blog’s content is one good way to drive traffic and build links at the same time. To fully take advantage of social bookmarking, you need to create quality content and make large number friends at social bookmarking sites.

Social Networking
This is a very powerful way to gain truckloads of traffic to your blog if you do it right. Build up a solid network of friends in social networking sites such as FaceBook, Friendster and MySpace and leverage on these networks to market and promote your blog. If you do it right, expect a steady stream of repeat traffic.

As you can see, if you applied some of these free methods to market and promote your blog, you can probably see some good results soon. As mentioned before, you have to test and track to see which method is bringing in the best results for you and keep them while discarding the ones that are not working or bringing in the least results. However at the end of the day, you still need to provide quality content in order to make your blog sticky and make people keep coming back again. If you have some other great free methods to market a blog, feel free to share it with us.

Personally for me, I make money online through affiliate marketing, Google Adsense, paid reviews and selling of text links on my blogs initially. Nowadays, I am focusing my efforts on affiliate marketing, selling of products and services instead. As you can see, there are many ways to monetize a blog such as:

• Affiliate marketing
• Google Adsense
• Membership programs
• Other contextual ad programs such as Kontera, Yahoo! Publisher Network etc.
• Paid reviews
• Selling advertisement spaces
• Selling of text links
• Selling products
• Selling services
• Many more

While there is no certainty that you can replace your full time income though blogging, if you put in a reasonable amount of time and effort will at the very minimum be able to make a few hundred dollars a month from blogging at the comfort of your own home. This is a very important source of income generating opportunity for those people who are looking for an alternative source of income or for those who are not able to work full time in a job like housewives and students.

However, if you are looking to replace your full time income through blogging, that is an entirely different question. While there are plenty of 6 figure bloggers and full time bloggers online, the sad reality is that majority of bloggers will never be able to replace their full time income through blogging. It takes more than just simply blogging to make a full time income online. You need dedication, a strong desire to succeed and learn continuously and also to treat your blogging activities as a business in order to achieve the income level that you desired.

Otherwise, if you will to make changes later in the future, you will waste a lot of time and effort building links that are no longer valid when you change your URLs. While this tutorial is not a complete guide to optimizing a WordPress blog, the few tips listed below will ensure that you will go on a good footing in the SEO game initially.

Change permalink structure
It is important to change your permalink structure as the default WordPress permalink structure is not search engine friendly. Check out a previous post that I have written on “Search engine Friendly WordPress URLs” to learn how to change your Worpress permalink structure.

Add a sitemap
A sitemap is basically a page to all your internal pages, all from one location. Having a sitemap makes it easier for the search engines to locate and index your blog. I use this plugin called “Google XML Sitemaps Generator” from Arne Brachhold to create sitemaps for search engines.

Add tags to your posts
Using tags to organize your content is another good way to ensure goodwill from the search engines and sites like Technocrati. It also allows your blog visitors to easily identify what your blog is and also searches for content more easily.

Use ‘alt’ attributes to describe your tags
Search engine spiders and robots do not know how to read images, so it helps if you can help them to identify what a image is all about by using the ‘alt’ attributes to put in descriptions. A simple tip is to put in keywords that you want to rank for inside the description. Just make sure you don’t overdo it.

Write unique and quality content
Unique and quality content will ensure your site will be well loved by the search engines. Important point to take note is to write content that gives people value rather than for the search engines only. Ultimately, sites with unique and quality content will fare better and lasted longer than sites using pure PLR materials or scraping content off other sites.

These few tips will get your WordPress blog started on the right track to attract more traffic. As you move along and become more experience using WordPress, you will find more advance tips and strategies to optimize your WordPress blog. Just remember to check out my blog from time to time.

There are many blogging platforms around, and the best of them have to be WordPress currently. Although I may be biased in saying that but having used WordPress for quite a period of time, I find that no other blogging platforms offer the same power and flexibility that WordPress offers.

I have previously written a post on “6 Reasons To Use WordPress” and you should check it out to know why WordPress remains the choice of blogging platform for many bloggers and online marketers.

TypePad is another popular blogging platform for many bloggers. I have no prior experience using TypePad so I do not have any comments to make about this blogging platform. But judging from TypePad popularity, you can be sure that TypePad will be another viable option for bloggers.

Alright, before I drifted off topic, here are the blogging platforms that you can look into in the event that you want to start a blog:

1. Blogsmith
2. Expression Engine
3. Movable Type
4. Typepad
5. WordPress

And for those of you who prefer the free option, here is a list of sites that you can host your blog for free:
1. Blogger
2. LiveJournal
3. Multiply
4. WordPress
5. Xanga

For those of you who are unsure of which blogging platform to go for, go for WordPress. You will never go wrong with Worpress just like me.

This simple tutorial is to guide those who are new online to sign up for an account with WordPress.com and set up their very first free hosted WordPress blog. Just follow these simple steps and you will be well on your way to your first WordPress blog.

To sign up for you’re a free hosted WordPress blog, just click on the big blue “SIGN UP NOW” button. It will then take you to the next screen.

You have a choice of straightaway having a blog of your choice or just signing up for an account. Remember to tick on the “Legal Flotsam” box after reading the terms of services first. Fill up all the necessary information and proceed to clicking on the “NEXT” button to go to the next screen.

Over this screen, you can choose the blog domain name to be hosted at WordPress.com. Please note that this domain name must be unique. If the domain name that you have chosen is not available, you must select another. As for the blog title, you can choose any name as you like. Once you have filled up all the information, click on the “Signup” button.

At this point, an activation email will be send to the email address that you have used for registration. You need to click on the link inside the email to activate your account or else you will be required to register again. Once you have activated your account, you can then log in to your blog’s account to write your first post.

Inside your WordPress blog control panel, you can choose a different theme for your blog. There are many plugins and themes to make your wordpress blog a complete CMS. However to take advantage of the full benefits and features of WordPress, it is better to have your own hosting and domain. Take your time to play with the functions and settings inside WordPress and when you are ready, get your own domain and hosting to make some money blogging.

As Blogger is owned by Google, you can use your existing Gmail account to log in to Blogger and create your blog. Although you can use your Yahoo! Or Hotmail accounts to register for a Blogger’s account; I find it best to use my Gmail account for accessing my Blogger’s account.

Alright, here’s to the first step. If you have an existing Google account, just sign in using your email and password in the boxes on the top right corner. Otherwise if you do not have any exiting Google account, just click on the “CREATE A BLOG” orange button.

Once you click on that button, you will be direct to the next screen below. Fill up all the necessary information indicate in the boxes.

When you have finish, just click on the “CONTINUE” button to go to the next screen.

At this stage, your account is already registered and it is time to name your blog. Choose a suitable name for your blog. You can choose anything as the name need not be unique. However, it is a different issue when it comes to the blog address or blog URL. You need select one that has not yet been selected by others. For example if you type “ProfitablePoint” into the empty box, you will find that it is already taken up by yours truly.

To check for the availability of each blog URL, just click on the underlined “Check Availability” link. As for the part on the advance options, just ignore it for the time being. Once you finish filling up all the boxes, just click on the “CONTINUE” button to go to the next screen to select a template for your blog.

Now it is time to select a template for your blog. Go through the available templates and choose one that you like. When ready, click on the “CONTINUE” button to go to the next screen.

Now that you have finished setting up your blog, it is time to start blogging. Just click on the “START BLOGGING” button to start writing your very first post for your blog.

As you can see, getting started on blogging is not as technical or difficult as it seems. Once you got your Blogger’s blog started, start playing around and familiarized yourself with the functions and settings inside. You will find yourself mastering blogging basics in no time.

While starting a blog is relatively easy (you can get tons of information online on starting a blog), you should consider carefully certain points so that you can integrate your personal plans and goals into building a business plan for your blog that is assuming you are going to monetize your blog in the future. Otherwise if you are starting a blog not for commercial reasons, then you can forget about reading the rest of this post.

The first thing you should ask your self is the intention you have for the blog. Are you using your blog to reach out to your audience, to foster relationships or just as an avenue to express your thoughts and feelings? Or are you trying to create a community of like-minded individuals. In other words, what plans do you have for your blog? It is important for you to map out the direction that you want your blog to move towards. Having clear defined goals for your blog will goes a long way to achieving the success that you craved.

Another point that you should consider is that a blog is predominantly a medium for people to express themselves in the written word. So it is vital for you to understand that writing is part and parcel of a starting blog and you should enjoy it. Otherwise, in the long run, you may find it hard to sustain the frequency and quality of your writings.

Also, bear in mind blogging is just like any other online business models, you need to be very self disciplined and focus in your daily blogging activities. Set aside a schedule each day and stick to them no matter what happens. Chances are if you can be self disciplined and focus, you will reach your goals sooner than you have plan.

You also need to understand the importance of continuous learning and reading. Web and blogging technologies are always changing all the time. You need to be on the constant lookout for any new changes that may impact the process of your blog. Which is why, you should never ever stop learning and reading about web and blogging related stuff. The day you stop upgrading your knowledge is the day your online business stops processing.

Now, before you go out and start that blog, you should seriously ask yourself these questions. This is vital as you can see starting a blog can be a very easy thing, however sustaining and ensuring your blog is a success is dependent on a lot of factors that you should seriously consider in the first place. Otherwise, you may as well work on other online business models. Even then, you still need to put in hard work to ensure success just like blogging.

If you intend to monetize your blog with Adsense ads, it would be advisable to keep your blog post to a minimum length of 250 words. One of the most profitable locations for Adsense ads is inside the content of a blog post. If you are going to place Adsense ads inside your blog post, 250 words is the minimum to ensure that your words can wrap around the Google ads.

Another point you should also take note is that an average reader’s attention span is rather short and that is why blogs with short posts tend to do better than blogs with longer blog posts. However, that is not to say that this point applies to all blogs. It all depends on your niche and target audience. For example, a review type post tends to be longer than a news type post.

Personally, I find having a mixture of long and short posts is the most ideal formula. You can probably set aside a day each week when you will post a long featured post of your choosing or to address your reader’s questions. As for the rest of the week, you can write shorter posts on the latest news and happenings. However, a lot depends on the nature of your blog and the niche it is in.

There is no standard thumb of rule on how long a blog post should be, you should do your own testing to see what is the best mix for your blog. At the end of the day, it is your readers that count so it pays to cater to their needs.