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Let’s face it, without visitors your blog serves little purpose other than an avenue for you to express yourself.  And if you plan on making any kind of capital from your blog, you need to drive regular and consistent traffic to it.  Take Syed Balkhi as an example.  This young student set up his website Balkhis and within 6 months his monthly profit was reaching nearly $2000, with just 538 subscribed readers and other less frequent visitors.  He used some of the simple tips and techniques we’re about to reveal to you, which are easily compatible with a free website builder package, proving there is money to be made from a WordPress blog.  You just need to get enough people to read it.

Here are 15 simple ways to get more traffic to your WordPress blog, starting today!

1. Use Social Media: Facebook and Twitter both experienced triple digit growth in 2009, so it’s vital to tap into their trillions of visitors and use them to promote your blog.  Search engines also rank pages according to how many external links you have.  Plug-ins such as ShareThis and Sociable invite your visitors to submit your posts on their social sites.  Plus you can use a feed, such as Twitter feed, which puts your latest posts as RSS feeds on your Twitter account and updates your blog with any Tweets. You can download all of these plug-ins for free on our resources and plug ins page.
2. Promote on forums: another way to increase your external links and therefore your search engine ranking is to promote your blog on forums.  Sites such as Bloggeries and Digitalpoint can be really effective.  Do inspire potential visitors with a bit of your content, rather than blatant advertising.
3. Promote through prizes: get friends to promote the competition on their social networking sites, as well as using other forums, blogs and even local press to increase awareness.  This is a great way to increase a loyal readership that comes back regularly. 
4. Local promotion: can you get some free publicity by running a competition in your local newspaper or radio station?  You could also give away freebies at a gig or hand out flyers at your local college.
5. Freebies:  if you’re selling a product, send some free samples to journalists, national magazines, local press, review websites and any other relevant organization that might give you a free plug.
6. Comment on other blogs: commenting on other relevant blogs not only allows you to check out the competition and what they’re writing.  You can also become one of their top commentators, which can increase exposure for your own blog.
7. Track what works and what doesn’t: if you know which posts are most popular and what your subscribers tend to like, you’re more likely to increase their loyalty and encourage them to bring more readers with them.  Using a plug-in such as Google Analytics or StatPress, which can tell you everything you need to know about your visitors.
8. Search Engine Optimization: it’s important to write with search engines in mind, which means paying attention to relevant keywords.  WordPress have a free All in One SEO plug-in which is so simple to use and does the job for you.
9. Add Multimedia: by adding images and video clips you can drive traffic to your site through multimedia search engines.  You can also optimize your search engine ranking by adding relevant keywords to your images and clips.
10. Create a Sitemap: using the Google XML Sitemap plug-in is so easy.  Each time you edit or create new content, the sitemap will be updated and all major search engines notified.
11. Create good content: take care of your loyal readership and give them content they’ll enjoy.  It’s important you take care of your consistent readers, who are likely to spread the word about your blog and encourage other readers to join.  Keep it fresh and update your blog three to five times per week to keep your visitors coming back for more.
12. Make use of RSS feeds: RSS feeds allow you to keep your subscribers informed of new content on your site, as well as increasing traffic.  They are one of the most effective ways of publicizing your site and improving your search engine ranking.  The basic WordPress package from any free website builder involves RSS feeds, which you can then customize to maximize your traffic.
13. Make friends with your visitors: people who enter your site will come from a variety of different routes and each with a huge network of their own friends.  Using the Referrer Detector plug-in increases interactivity with your visitors from different routes, and allows you to customize your greeting.  For example, you can remind Diggers to dig your story, or ask Tweeters to Tweet to your post.
14. Improve your article descriptions: description meta tags should contain your keywords, which can increase your search engine ranking.  Also make your meta tag description enticing, as this is what readers will see on the search results page and will make the difference as to whether they click on your site or not.
15. Keep subscribers coming back: by using the Subscribe to Comments plug-in you can inform a user by email when someone has replied to their comment.  This increases traffic because they’re likely to keep coming back every time the conversation continues.