6 great tips for driving more traffic to your blog

I see lots of questions in this community about how to drive more blog traffic so I thought I would list a few tips. I work with thousands of bloggers and these are some tactics that can really make a difference in traffic:

1.  Twitter - if you are a blogger, it really pays to learn to love Twitter. Its a great way to share your new posts with a large audience and find other blogs to comment on. You can also search Twitter by topic (i.e. "teenagers" or "day care") and share your posts with people who are looking for info you might have blogged about. Don't be afraid to reach out to potential readers this way.

2.  Tag your posts - both Blogger and Wordpress let you add keywords to each post (although WP is better at this). Take a few moments with each post and think about what terms someone might type into Google. Adding those keywords helps search engines connect your blog with people who are looking for topics you've written about!

3.  Comment on other post. Not just a quick "hi - love your pics!" but a genuine, thoughtful comment that tells that blogger you really connected with their site and looked around. Your comment can add value to that bloggers post by providing even more info for their readers. Make your comment as interesting to read as the post.

4. Guest post on other blogs. Most sites and blogs are always looking for more content and posts. It gives the blog author a break for a day and exposes your writing to new readers. Its tempting to think that your efforts would be better spent on your own blog but giving to others ALWAYS comes back to you!

5. Link to bigger blogs. I'm not suggesting you go link-crazy but its helps your Google rankings when you link to larger blogs that have high "credibility" ratings with search engines. So if you are posting about something at Target, go ahead and hyperlink to their site. If you blogging about a product, store, celebrity, quoting from a news source, visiting a city - go ahead and link to their site.

6. Add social tools to your blog such as BlogFrog - BlogFrog is a network of almost 20,000 bloggers who all link to one another via widgets. So when you visit a BlogFrog site, your blog actually shows up on their widget for ALL their readers to see. It drives reciprocal traffic. You can even add an instant community to your site that lets readers interact, which draws even more traffic. In the interest of full disclosure, I am one of the co-founders of BlogFrog so I might be a little biased :) But I am first a mom like you, as well as a blogger and member CafeMom.

Just wanted to share some tips that bloggers I have worked with seem to really like. What tips would you add to this list?