Increasing blog traffic, How?

Note: This will probably be my last post for a while as I am currently away and then I am of to London for a while, later. Sorry…

Over the past few months or so I have been trying to find out ways to populate traffic to my blog. Along my travels I have found some ways that work very well and some that have no effect at all. I thought it will would helpful to you guys to post my findings.
First off you need to clarify a few things. These are:

1. Who your intended audience is. My specific audience is Flash designers and developers.
2. A few sites that are where you want to be. This lets you analyze what they do, how they do it, and what the outcome is.
3. What your blog is about. This is something you should know, but if you change it suddenly then you are going to lose a lot of visitors as they are either going to think you doesn’t know what you are talking about, or that it’s not your main area of expertise. This doesn’t limit you to one particular thing; you just need to be able to link it to your blog topic.
4. You must be prepared to blog fairly regularly. Too many blogs just lose visitors because of lack of recent content.

Now we have sorted that, there are a few technical details you need to take into account. These are loading time, content displayed and if your intended audience are likely to meet the requirements needed by the displayed content. With that all sorted, onto the main part of the article. How to get more visitors.

1. Get as bigger list as possible of blogs that blog about the same sort of stuff you do, and then when they post new stuff, leave a comment. You don’t even have to read the article, or even like the blog, just leave a comment and a link to your site if possible. This means that anyone else who views this article will see your name and probably click through to your site. Once they are there if they like what they see, they will hopefully become a regular visitor.
2. With smaller blogs like yours will be (to start off anyway), strike a deal with them to link to each other. This will provide beneficial to both of you. This is where what sort of topics you are writing about and what the topic of the other blog comes into play.
3. Add your blog to as many blog directory’s as possible. A good place to start would be Technorati. Here, you also need to be sure of the topics you want to write about.
4. Digg your articles. Add a Digg button to your site and hopefully people will click it. This will at least get you listed in their latest section for a while.
5. Find a niche in the market. This is one of the biggest things that you need. Saying that your blog is about Flash isn’t good enough. You need to be more specific. Things like 3D in Flash, or even more specific like using a particular engine. This should be good enough for a niche. Or something like Flash Lite which was what Richard Leggett’s niche was. Find out everything there is to know about this and write about it.
6. Contact other bloggers. This is certainly not a failsafe method as it depends who you contact. If you try to email big companies or extremely popular bloggers then you will be lucky if they even read your email. I remember about 6 months ago I contacted Fi and was lucky enough to get an email back which was great as it gave me a professional and expert opinion on my site. As them if they have any tips on how to increase traffic, or loading time or whatever. If they are popular in which the world you want to be then maybe they can help you out by introducing you to other, more senior people.

So there you go, my top 6 ways to increase traffic. Now remember this is just a set of guide lines and are not going to work for certain at all. The key is good, reliable content. Once you have this you are half way there, if not all the way.

Harry.