Starting a blog can be super fun and exciting, but how do you get people to notice it?  How do you get your first traffic?  We know that Google and the other search engines will eventually crawl your blog and index a page or two, but in the meantime I would like to talk about a couple of things you can do while you wait.

Submit to directories

Find directories in your niche, if you have one, and submit your URL.  If available, do NOT forget to write up a nice description of what other users will find there.  Use some keywords that work for your blog and make sure you don’t ramble on and on…

Use Forum Signatures

Don’t forget about using the signature file for the forums that you participate in.  That is one of the easiest ways to get a link back (no-follow or not) to your blog and when you post relevant information on the forums, people will start to notice the links in the signature.  Don’t get all cute and obtrusive though, just a simple text link will do.

Optimize

There are a couple of plugins available for Wordpress blogs, to help you with optimization for search traffic.  This will take some work and a little bit of research, but in the long run will help you out the most.  You want as much traffic from search as you can get, otherwise you might be paying for traffic to get any.

These are just a couple of things that you can do while you wait for a search engines to pick your blog up.  Don’t forget to create a robots.txt file, too.  That way the spiders know where they are going when they get to your blog.

Did I miss anything?