So you are a blogger, you just launched your site. You are seeking out different ways to get traffic to your site… you are failing, you feel terrible that you can't seem to get people interested in your site. What do you do? 

Contribute! Contribute! Contribute!
People tend to focus so much on getting traffic to their site, they tend to forget what is important. You need to contribute. Contributing is a very effective way to gaining the trust and interest of people… build relationships, make friends, and find people with similiar interests.

Traffic can be gained by having money to spend on advertisements (some work, but most don't). But if you are like me… you don't really have a lot of money, let alone extra money to spend on advertising… and in all honesty, if I had money… I wouldn't pay for advertising anyway, it's not THAT effective of a method of getting people to your site and is a waste of money and time.

Contributing means… making a daily effort to finding content on OTHER sites that interest you. Finding content out there that is similiar to the content that you publish on your own site. If you focus most of your time to going out there and meeting people and putting your thoughts to writing on other publisher's sites, you will start to find that you won't need to set aside much time for marketing.

I am going to be really making this a goal of mine for Sept. This month I had a lot on my plate with doing a lot of work on the site. However, with the time I spent contributing on other people's site, the rewards were doubled.

At a minimum… you can always say this to yourself: You will get back only what you put out… and you will get garbage back if garbage is what you put out.

Use technorati to search for posts that are similiar to yours and comment and add to them. Please don't spam sites either… don't comment just for the purpose of adding your link to their site. Blogger are people and are just like you… not stupid. When someone visits YOUR site and comments, you can tell pretty quickly if it is a real comment or a spammer (someone just looking to get their link out).

When you contribute on other sites you will start to see that a small percentage of people will follow over to your site to learn more about who you are, what you publish, and what you like to talk about. These are all people that can become regular 'every day' viewers.

The more you contribute, the more times your link is out there on sites that are similiar and relevant to your own. By contributing on other sites… partly you are showing people who you are, what kind of person you are, and also important: what your interests are, etc…

If you contribute on 100 different blog posts, you are rewarded with 100 different references back to your site. When you start to see people coming in from a certain site, recognize that and provide a link back to that site so that your current viewers can jump over there and be apart of that community as well.

Below is a partial screen shot of all the different pages that my link is on where people have jumped over here to check things out. These are all one hitters… I am enclosing this screen shot to show you how it is effective to comment and contribute on other blog sites.

These are just one hitters… There are hundreds of individual pages out there with my link on it… and more importantly these links contain very rich and useful information. If you take time to publish excellent quality comments, people will see that if you take the time to create such a wonderful comment, then more likely you do the same if not MORE when you publish on your own site… making it very appealing to visit.

Also a rule of thumb that I use: about 2% to 10% of a site's regular viewers will view your site via a comment or trackback. Honestly, that is pretty good! If you are like me and do nothing but surf the Internet and different blog sites… then those numbers add up. Of the 2% to 10% that visit I would say 50% will start visiting on a regular basis. With these numbers now on your mind… think of what your traffic would be like if you were to contribute on 1000 different websites? Think about what your traffic would be like if you contribute on a REGULAR BASIS in 25 different blog sites… The numbers will add up very quickly as time goes by… and don't forget: Time Goes By Fast!

Create excellent quality posts on your site, find others similiar to yours, contribute there and help towards building the site of other publishers, and you will find a lot of harmony in that.

Use technorati as a tool to finding blog sites and post that interest you. Traffic is there… go get you some!