Let’s face it, we blog for other people, sure we blog because we like it, but what’s the point really if no one reads it right?

So how do we bring traffic or visitors to our sites to read what we ramble about?

There are several ways to do this of course, and I’d like to touch on a few and maybe help others out who are trying to get traffic to their site.

This is by no means a complete list, just something off the top of my head that I compiled quickly for this post:

Contests and GiveAways:

This is probably one of the easier ways to get traffic to your site, and of course get link backs as well. Hold a contest and give something away like a prize or money even, people love to get free stuff and especially love money. The best thing to do is to do it randomly, have people link to you with an anchor text of your choice and just randomly draw a winner when the contest is over. The idea of the anchor text and link is essentially to bring traffic and also to help your search engine rankings by using that particular anchor text to identify your blog.

A couple examples would be:

Hey It’s Free – He blogs about free stuff you can find, including contests offering free stuff, if you have a contest then drop him a line

ContestBlogger – There are quite a few blogs that are just blogs about contest, but one that is becoming popular very fast is Contest Blogger, he’ll post about your contest and even have it featured for a price…

Reviews:

Have people review your site, especially if you are a higher ranking blog, you can offer to link back to other blogs if they review your site, this not only helps you with a bit more exposure but also helps out ‘the little guy’ who is trying to make a name for themselves and sends some quality traffic their way as well.

Community Traffic Generators:

There are a couple popular blogging community sites out there, these help to link blogs together and help individuals find out about new blogs as well that they might be interested in.

MyBlogLog – is by far the most popular blogging community out there, it’s easy to use and very well done.

BlogCatalog – is sort of MyBlogLogs competition, BlogCatalog works but just not as well as MyBlogLog, personally I just don’t like the feel of BlogCatalog, but if it helps to get more traffic then join either way right?

Technocrati – sort of falls under the community traffic generators, but it’s not quite as community oriented as the above two are, but it does work very well at bringing traffic and we all know that Technocrati is used for ranking your site.

BlogRush – not quite a community traffic generator, but they work with you displaying a widget on your site, like I have at the bottom right. Every time you get a page view, your site gets a link on someone another BlogRush widget. It’s listed under community because it takes the community of bloggers joining to make it work. It’s a very interesting and very new concept that I’m curious to see how it works…

Social Bookmarking Sites:

Social bookmarking sites are a lot harder to get into, but they can bring a bit of traffic to your site and if you’re VERY lucky they can bring a whole lot of traffic to your site and make you very popular overnight… but it doesn’t last long…

Digg – we all know what Digg is, no explanation needed

del.icio.us – another type of social bookmarking site that can work as well as Digg does

Reddit – it’s a different type of social bookmarking site, a bit more on the conservative side I think though..

The next three don’t quite fall under Social Bookmarking but they sort of work the same way..

StumbleUpon – has become very popular, it sort of works on the social bookmarking but you have a browser plugin or toolbar that allows you to essentially vote on sites or articles

DIY News – not many people really know about DIY News, but you can submit stories and users can vote on them. They have an interesting rating system where your story/article can be voted on and commented on as well.

Slashdot – Slashdot really isn’t social bookmarking as it is editorial bookmarking, you submit something and just hope it gets picked by one of their editors….

Feel free to comment on others out there, as I said this is by no means a complete list, just something I threw together that I thought might be a bit interesting to others out there…