I have been trying to figure out what the best way to bring more traffic to this blog, as well as others that I write, might be. I continue to try several things, with differing results. Some thing seem to bring in quite a bit of traffic, while others haven’t produced nearly as well as they have been billed. I’ll give you 3 that I have been working with, either here or elsewhere, as well as my assessment of each.

Entre Card–EntreCard is certainly a popular element popping up on many blogs today, and provides a way to exchange traffic, browse blogs, and get to know different blogs and bloggers. This has been a steady producer of traffic whenever I have the time to sit and browse through blogs. That luxury is becoming more and more scarce by the time I read the blogs that I like, and then finish all the writing I want to do. Overall, this is a great program, and you should sign up and give it a try. You should be warned that most traffic generation will be reciprocal in nature, so you will have to look at a lot of blogs. I haven’t had a lot of luck with building a readership from this yet, but this blog is still new.  One big drawback I have seen is that many people only stay on the site long enough to click your EntreCard widget, and then move on.  They don’t actually read what you are writing.  I wish EntreCard users would prove me wrong here by leaving a brief comment on this post!

Blog Catalog–This has been one of the greatest tools that I have used across all my blogs. Blog Catalog provides a way for bloggers to truly network. It is easy to find bloggers with similar interests, and interact with them. For one of my blogs in particular, I have hooked up with a lot of bloggers with a similar mindset, and have been able to develop good blogging relationships, and a pretty good amount of readers. If you have a blog, it is a good idea to join up with Blog Catalog, and get networked with other bloggers.

Blog Rush–This has not produced like I thought it would, but I haven’t tried to use it too much. After beginning to write this review, I went and signed into my account (which I haven’t done since setting it up) and found that I have had several visitors from there. The trick, it appears, is to make sure and write a very catchy title. That makes sense since it is the only thing that appears on the widget when your feed is broadcast on the network.  I am going to give this a bit more time, and effort, just to see if it can be productive.  I think I will spend a little time over at their site, and see if there is something I am missing!

I know there are a lot more ways to generate traffic, and I will cover more of them later.  However, these 3 will get you started if you need to get some traffic to your site pretty quickly.

Ok, this seems to be the next craze in driving traffic to your blog. This may not be a very new system, but it is new to me, and is a growing trend on many of the blogs that I have been reading. Entrecard is advertised as being like business cards for your blog. The idea is that you put the widget on your blog, like the one I have over to the right hand side of this blog, and then visit the network of users. You can certainly spend a lot of time clicking on links and checking out new blogs. The question is, how effective is this?

Personally, I have seen a good bit of traffic come to blogs that I have added to the network. However, the problem seems to be that the people are really only coming to get credit for clicking on the links, and do not spend any time reading the posts. This obviously does not provide more subscribers or regular readers. It will be interesting to see how this traffic is handled by ranking sites, such as Google. Will they view it as “paid” traffic, or regular traffic? I guess we will just have to wait and see.

The upside is, if the traffic ends up being beneficial for you, you can add your advertisement to several other blogs by purchasing space on their widget. The good news is that it will not cost you any money. Simply spend your “credits”, which you earn by surfing the network. You can also “sell” your space, thus earning more credits. With the growing popularity of the system, there are also many contests that pop up, giving away credits as prizes. So, this is another way to stockpile your credits, and buy more advertising. Blog contests also draw a lot of attention, so offering this prize could also be beneficial in your marketing campaigns.

This system can certainly get your blog out there, but it is not nearly as targeted as some of the other blog networks can be. This is easy to set up, and easy to run, so it is worth the time to set up an account. If you read through the blogs you come to, you will find a ton of good material, and a lot of stuff that is just down right interesting!

So, now to try and prove my assumption wrong (that no one really reads the blogs they find via Entrecards) make sure that you leave a comment below to let me know you do read the posts!