Blogging For Traffic - What Your Blog Needs First Before You Will Reap Any Traffic Benefits

Blogs generate huge volumes of traffic, particularly blogs that are updated regularly, are interactive and filled with comments by readers. Some blogs have built up regular followers who give feedback and even one blog post can attract a large readership depending on the interest the topic generates.
To get traffic, your blog must possess the following:

1. The blog must be user friendly, interactive, informative and useful to the needs of the reader. When someone comes upon your blog, what are their first impressions? Can they find what they are looking for? Is it easy to navigate? Does it contain up to date and relevant content?
2. It should target a particular audience and be receptive to their needs. Does it answer their questions, is there a way for them to contact you for more information?
3. The blog owner should build up a relationship with its readers and always offer value either through the content of the blog post, a free giveaway etc. How well was your question answered? How well were other questions answered? Is this someone you can relate to and would you be willing to come back again?
4. The blog should contain links so that the blog post can be passed through social bookmarking methods. These comprise a variety of social bookmarking plugins such as Tweetmeme, Sociable, Digg, Follow Me On Twitter etc which can be put above or below the post.
5. It should contain an RSS feed source as some people prefer RSS format for reading.
6. It should be topical and ideally write on a topic that is current and that people are generally interested in. If people are talking about it, they will be interested in reading about it too. Note: Check out sites such as Ask Jeeves, Google Insights and relevant forums. When using forums, check out the number of posts, threads and comments for popularity and write about your observations.
7. A number of plugins to assist with traffic generation is essential and very easy to install. A few that I would recommend are All in One SEO, Google XML Sitemaps, No Follow Case by Case, Sociable, Subscribe To Comments, AdSense Deluxe, What Would Seth Godin Do? There are so many more out there. Just type in "top plugins for traffic" in your browser window to get a list. I will address the most popular ones in detail in a separate post.

If I was to leave you with a final tip and tell you the most important thing a blog must have, it would be "fresh content". Your regular readers will dwindle if you do not encourage them to come back and new readers like to see blogs that are dynamic, responsive and reflect a real presence of someone actively participating in their blog.