I think everyone will agree that we all want lots of traffic to come to our site right? I started my new blog .dotEdu guru less than a month ago and have been doing everything I can to bring traffic. I’ve got lots of web and technical experience, I’m actually a Webmaster at a small liberal arts college in the US, so I kind of thought I knew what I was doing. No problem write good content, pick a good theme, and go… no problem right… well not quite that easy. Let me offer you a few tips about creating a good blog and getting people to come to it.

Content is KING!

Of course you already knew this, but it’s the truth if you can’t find good things to talk about and aren’t able to effectively talk about them, then why is anyone going to want to visit your site? Find a niche and stick with it. If you want to create a blog that posts a funny video a day then great, that’s your niche. What are you the expert in?

Your site hurts my eyes!

The days of people having blue backgrounds and pink text are thankfully over, but what your site visually looks like really does matter. If you aren’t great at graphic design and color layout then ask for help. It’s not a bad idea to even fork over a little money to pay someone else to design a layout for you. If you have a WordPress blog then luckily their are thousands of themes already out there to choose from. You can check out this post I did a while back to learn more about themes and where to get them. Also there are other great tools out there for picking and choosing a color palette. I highly recommend:

• Color Palette Generator
• Sphere (Color Theory Visualizer)

Also jump onto Digital Point and submit your site to the forum there and ask people what they think. There is a whole section for site reviews. Also this will help you get some addition traffic and maybe someone will even save your feed? Digital Point has thousands of users and almost all of them don’t know you, so they don’t have a problem hurting your feelings by telling you if they thing something sucks. Also with your site BRANDING is important. Get yourself a favicon, decide if you want your URL to be www.mysite.com or mysite.com. Remember your an expert on your blog subject so Brand yourself like you are an expert! Once again you can check out my Recommended WordPress Themes and Plugins for some tools to assist with the Favicon and URL branding.

Now what?

Ok so you have your awesome looking site and your writing the best content that’s ever existed. Now it’s time to hit the social bookmarking scene to pub your content. Most experienced people will tell you that you don’t want to submit your own site to these, but instead let someone else do it. Well your site is new and you don’t have a following so who cares what the experts say, you aren’t there yet. If you don’t use anything else you have to setup a Digg and a StumbleUpon account. I would recommend setting up everything, the more you can submit to the better! There are some great tools out there for mass submission:

• Socialmarker – This site uses frames to let you submit your site to 32 social bookmarking sites all in a linear format! It will even do it in such a way where you don’t have to rewrite your description and tags every time. My biggest gripe is they don’t include Sphinn and Mixx!
• Socializer – This is another great site that will allow you to submit. Socializer’s list includes 50 sites! They do include Sphinn, but are still lacking Mixx.
• Shareaholic – This is a wonderful Firefox extension that allows you to submit to some of the bigger sites. Another thing that I really like about this extension is that it tells you how many times something has been Dugg or marked on Del.icio.us.

Lots of work tell me the black magic

Ok I’ll admit I’m still a young padawan in the dark arts, but I have found a few really great tools. I’m not going to give names to things because I don’t want to incure any backlash, but I will describe them. If you want to know more come visit my blog and comment or friend me on my About Author page.

• Digg, Stumble, and Propeller trader – There is a site that I recently joined that lets you trade digging, stumbling, or propelling other peoples content for you doing the same for them. Really easy and if you have a must get dugg post you can purchase credits to get the job done.
• Auto-surfing – One of the biggest problems with new blogs is getting that Alexa ranking up high enough where a advertiser would want to bid on your site. Well let’s just say I know a tool that will do this. You can set it up to auto-surf all night and build up credits to have other individuals surf your site with full Alexa worthy hits.
• Digital Point Forums – I’ll mention this one by name because this site is just amazing. If you don’t have an account already go get one. You can do digg, stumble trades where I’ll digg something for you if you digg something for me. You can submit your site to directories to build up your page ranking and get your site more incoming links. You can buy shady services and much, much, more. This is also a great community to simply surf around and learn.

I hope that these tips help you out a little bit. Also it’s important to build up as many Digg and StumbleUpon friends as possible so get started by friending me on Digg and StumbleUpon!