There’s all sorts of places that will offer to teach you how to build up a successful blog. Pretty much all of them will charge you for it at some point.
Here’s my pro-tip and it costs you nothing, except the time to read about it and to think about it.
The trick is to actually blog.
You know, actually write stuff.
Seems crazy, right? You’ll see all sorts of things about link-exchanges, traffic-boosters, blog layouts and SEO but at best, they only mildly enhance your results. They pale in comparison to actually writing.
Writing is the single most effective thing you can do with your blogging time. Reading comes a close second.
It takes time, surely, but every piece of your own content that’s out there has a chance to generate a result for someone searching for something. If they see you in a search result and click through, you’ve got a visitor.
They may read a few more items, or they may not. Likely a visitor doesn’t convert into a regular reader on the first visit, but if your stuff turns up in their search results a second or a third time, the odds are they’ll remember you, and they’ll consider sticking around to see what else you have to say.
But they probably won’t unless you’re producing content.
Writing is the key thing.
Write about what interests you. I’m a pretty boring writer, I think. My interests are eclectic and my style is generally fairly dry. But that doesn’t actually matter, because statistically there have to be people who find my stuff interesting. Once they’ve visited a couple of times, they generally stay!
Why? Because I keep writing, and the people who are interested in the content I write keep reading it. All that content keeps turning up in search results, and I don’t have to do a thing to make sure it does, other than to simply keep producing it.
All those search-results generate a background noise of visitors – in my case, a hundred or two hundred per day, whether I’m posting or not. Regular readers are on top of that, and both numbers keep growing slowly.
All I have to do is keep writing about what interests me.
And that’s all you have to do as well.
Just be patient, and don’t stop.
I’m curious, are you able to identify when I’m among the visitors in a given day if I don’t post a comment?
Not specifically, Tigro. I can tell the broad class of regular visitors apart from the class of casual visitors, though — The casual visitors almost always arrive via some form of search-result.