Many of us work so hard on our blogs and frankly, it kind of sucks if we don’t get the traffic we want. And it’s a catch-22you can’t get the traffic without the work, but it’s tough to justify all the work if you don’t get the traffic. Well, here are 11 suggestions to get the traffic you want to your blog.

1. Make your blog remarkable: There is a good reason this is first in the queue, that is because being remarkable can make all the other concerns fall into line. Everything else on a blog could be missing, but with this at its core it could still be a success.

How to be outstanding:

- Content is king. Inform your readers of every detail, give your viewers exactly what they want and speak to them in a way they almost understand. - The entertaining. Do whatever is needed to keep your readers glued to the page. Make them laugh and cry with you. - Connect with your readers. Speak to them as if you know them personally. Address their worries, concerns and well-being. - Controversy. Being infamous can also have its benefits, even ending in good publicity. Not everyone has to agree with your opinions for you to become well-known.

Some may disagree with this attitude, and advise that more effort should be put into building traffic the manual way. This may be so, but building up the content of your blog or sites can far outweigh any amount of traffic building. Think about it - what’s the point of sending masses of traffic when the average viewer will simply click away on arrival at your site.

# 2 The Power of RSS. It may be obvious to some, but there are thousands of blogs out there that haven’t even considered using an RSS feed. If you’re not sure what RSS means, it stands for really simple syndication - allowing users to subscribe to your blogs “feed”, which alerts them to every new post you make without them having to constantly visit the blog. Unless your viewer audience is overly tech savvy, and consider RSS to be yesterday’s news - I’d suggest giving the option to your readers that enables them to subscribe to your RSS feed, letting them view updates through their feed reader or e-mail accounts. Services are available to help the process like feedburner.com.

3. Blog and ping: Set up your blog with a list of other websites and services to ping to. This is now possible with most blogging platforms and server software. Building a good big ping list will enable other sites and search engines to spider your site every time there is an update.

#4 Comment on Other Blogs: Comment on other blogs in related field to your own. The option of linking back to your own blog is usually available. Make sure you are respectful! I would pay the conditions set by the blog owner, be courteous by offering real information instead of a big advertisement for your own blog. Without this kind of diplomacy, your comments will probably be deleted by admin.

5. Add trackbacks: You can get an automatic link back to your own posts by using trackbacks. If you’ve written a post and provided a link to a post on another blog, a link to your own post will appear in the comments section on the other blog. If you are doing trackbacks between two WordPress blogs, simply linking to someone else’s post will automatically set up the trackback. As mentioned in point 4, be polite! A simple summary of somebody else’s post or other garbled nonsense just to get a back link is not following proper blogging etiquette.

6. Keep up-to-date with your e-mail list: Your list can be the foundation to the success of your blog. Keep your list updated with relevant posts and helpful information that they may enjoy. Those on your list will appreciate the contact.

7. Distribute more content: Don’t limit all of your content just to your blog. Distribute your content in other ways, like article marketing videos, podcasting, posting content on other people’s sites and blogs etc. Keep pumping that content out to drive more visitors to your pages.

#8 Affiliate links: If you have your own in-house affiliate program, and you have enabled the affiliates to link to any page, ask them to link to your blog posts. I personally use a system called QuickSale.com, which is a 1shoppingcart solution. This enables affiliates to link to any blog post they prefer.

Traffic from your affiliates are cookied, so any purchases made on the day or at a later date will be attributed to the affiliates, and commission will be sent. Conversions on blog posts aren’t going to be as good as the sales page, but it gives your affiliates the chance to provide great content to their readers, and benefit from any purchases made.

9. Social Networking: The big named social networks can be a nice boost for traffic, especially MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. If your readers are able to meet you and socialize with you, they will be more interested in the things you talk about your blog. Remember to be polite and to use net etiquette. Try not to get too stuck in when logged into these networks, as you may find time slips away (there’s lots of other important work to get on with). Of course, if you are remarkable (or infamous), you would have created enough buzz for people to do their own talking on the social networks.

10. Online Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking includes well-known sites like del.icio.us, Stumble Upon and Digg. The site enables you to bookmark your favorite webpages and other content on the Internet. A lot of marketers choose to mark their own sites, but this could be against terms and conditions, so read the rules first. Another idea is to bookmark each other sites, but at the end of the day if you’re site’s good enough, people will bookmark it on their own accord.

11. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): I’ve chosen to put SEO at the end of the list, even though I know a lot of people would disagree. If you’re trying to find first-time visitors or people who are just browsing, SEO is fine, but if you want the faithful visitors who continuously return, try not to concentrate too much on optimization.

The trouble with trying to optimize every single page on your blog is the time it takes to do so, and the fact that you could be using that time for being remarkable. Remember that content should be readable rather than just written for the search engine’s, and keyword rich with the same phrase repeated throughout. If you’re savvy enough however, you could combine the two by optimizing your existing pages, but don’t make this a priority over your (remarkable) content.