I’m slowly building traffic to this site by:

¤ Posting a message on the online bulletin board of the freelance writer group I belong to whenever I put up a new post.

¤ Included an RSS feed button at the top of my blog, to encourage people to sign up to get new posts automatically mailed to them. See it up there in the top righthand corner?

¤ Using tags with common search terms on all my posts so they’ll get picked up by search engines like Google. I wrote more about this in a post called What Freelance Writers Should Know about SEO.

¤ Including the URL for this blog in my email signature.

¤ Including the name, description and URL in my LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn has a relatively new feature called Status that lets you write a short answer to the question “What are you working on?” so your LinkedIn connections can see what you’re doing. When someone looks at your LinkedIn profile, your Status sentence shows up at the very top, right under your name and job description. I use this feature to let my connections know about new blog posts. When I update my own “What are you working on?” description, the information appears on the Home page of all of my LinkedIn connections, so they can see what I’m up to – and hopefully, go read my blog.

Darren Rowse at ProBlogger offers some really good common sense tips in this post, 10 ways to improve blog traffic in 30 minutes or less. Among them: post your best stuff on the days of the week when you know you get a lot of traffic, and take time to respond to comments, so you’re building a rapport with your readers. Read Rowse’s other tips in the post.

Kathy Sena, a new online writer/editor friend, writes a blog called ParentTalkToday. In her email signature, instead of just listing a link to the blog, Sena also includes a line about her most recent blog post, which she rewrites every time she posts, and writes in a different color. The idea is for people to be so intrigued by what she’s written they follow the link to her blog. Here’s what it looks like:

Kathy Sena . Writer/Editor
Specializing in parenting, health, lifestyle and women’s issues
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Phone: 310-XXX-XXXX
Fax: 310-XXX-XXXX
Email: XXXXXXXXXX@XXXXX.net
Web: http://www.kathysena.com
Blog: http://www.parenttalktoday.com (Today we’re talking about keeping too many balls in the air…)

If you’ve got other tips for driving traffic to your blog, please share!