It can be a lonely time blogging if every day you logon to your stats and see that still there are no visitors arriving on your blog. But, once they start to arrive and even better still you see regular visitors hitting your site from RSS feeds, you really know you have made it. Here is how.

Although I would never say that a high Page Rank alone will get you lots of visitors, the steps needed to get a good Page Rank will also help to build your traffic. But building Page Rank alone is no way near enough. You need a plan of action to supplement it!

Writing articles and guest blogging will help to increase your inbound links and people reading these might also then wander over to your blog. But, these methods do not create the ongoing rush of visitors you need, unless you can get a really run away article success story.

What you also need to be doing is writing plenty of unique content. But, even this alone will not work. Writing a load of content pages and posting articles and guest blogs is getting there, but you need to merge the ideas to fully succeed.

To work this to its best, what you do is to research some related keywords for which there is a good amount of traffic. Then write an article or two based loosely around the keywords. Do not get carried away with stuffing too many occurrences of the keywords into the articles, just include a few mentions.

Then start to write batches of further articles about these same keywords. For example, I will write the initial article and then follow this up with a set of more detailed articles, each one exploring an aspect of the first article. These remaining articles, not the original article, are distributed to article directories and used as guest posts, rewritten slightly as required by the system they are being published to. All of these will usually allow two links back to my blog, one of which is used as a link to the original article with the anchor text being either the desired keyword phrase, or something very closely related.

For example, if I decided to work on ‘How to start a blog’, then I would write that as a post and publish it only to my blog, then write 6 to 8 posts about the different aspects of starting a blog. These additional posts can be posted to my blog, article directories and guest blogged.

These additional articles are what makes this system work. Because the initial post is unique and has potentially hundreds of other pages pointing to it, the value of the post increases and therefore the chance of the search engines sending me visitors increases over just a stand alone blog posting.

It is a lot of work! An initial post and then 6 to 8 supporting articles to be distributed, but if that is what it takes to drive large quantities of traffic to a blog then so be it! The distributed articles will help with the search engine optimisation of the page and also send some interested visitors over. And it is a rate that I can quite easily maintain for a few blogs, each getting 1 main new article a month.