Today I am going to give you a few tips on driving qualified traffic to your blog. Your blog isn’t very effective unless you have a reader base or you have a plan to grab a large user base in the next year. Here are 10 ways to drive traffic to your business Blog:

1. Your community - if you are on Twitter, Facebook, any social network, post your blog post to that network as soon as you finish it. (I will right after this)

2. Discussion boards - you must be blogging about a topic that is near and dear to you. Are you on message boards talking about it as well? When someone asks a question that you wrote about in the past..link them to your blog.

3. Read other blogs and regularly comment. Always, always add your link and full name or ghost name when commenting.

4. Submit your blog to a blog directory. Sites like www.zimbio.com link up a ton of blogs.

5. Add your blog, website, social networks to your email signature. Everyone who gets an email is a potential reader.

6. Make sure you have an RSS feed on your blog - very important. If a blog does not have a feed, there is not a chance that I will come back to read it or put it in my bookmarks…that’s what my RSS reader is for.

7. I’ve said this before, but commit to posting at least four times a week. The more your write, the better chance you have of search engines picking up your article.

8. Add Digg to your posts and encourage your readers to Digg it.

9. Put links to other blog posts in you articles (called trackbacks). This will help you get noticed on other blogs and perhaps people will come over for a visit.

10. The most important one - Offer value to your readers. Give them something they will come back for on a weekly basis.

Try out some of these methods on your blog and let me know if your readership goes up. Next week I will be talking about Re-designing and Developing your old website - why it is important right now. As always - If you ever have any questions on the article, feel free to contact me or post comments below.