Every blogger is looking to get more readership and traffic. Sometimes it can seem so difficult to build up your readership and to get to the point where you are getting natural growth from people sharing your articles. Here are some simple and free strategies to help you get more traffic to your blog. A side effect of these strategies will also be increased search engine rankingsfor your blog

1. Targeted Twitter messages

Twitter is an online social networkwith over 500 million active users. As Google and other major search engines are starting to factor social activity and the links shared on sites like Twitter, having a good social media presence here is a great way to attract new users. With this breadth of users, it also makes sense to harness the service as another way of connecting to potential customers.

Here is one way of doing this. Using specific keywords, you can search on twitter for people that might need your product or service, and you are to help them in any way that you can. For example, let’s say you have a blog on gardening. You can find the audience you are looking for by searching on twitter using keyword phrases related to gardening. Perhaps phrases like “starting garden”. Of course, the key here is finding the right phrases on twitter that are relevant to your topic area and that are used on twitter.

Then, you simply reach out and build relationship to these people. Remember, with social sites like Twitter, the best strategy is to build a large network of friends. The more helpful you are to people the more likely they are to want to visit your site and to help you in exchange..

Also, you don’t want to sell directly to them. Just offer advice and suggestions freely. Do not hesitate to recommend competing blogs or products. Everyone appreciates honesty and goodwill and if they see that you are genuinely offering helpful advice they will be interested in reading your blog.

You can also reach out to twitter users who have a large following in related areas and see if they are interested in some kind of joint venture. For example there might be someone with a large following of gardeners. Develop a relationship with them over Twitter and later you might end up getting access to their audience. Again don’t get straight to a business proposition, instead try to help them get what they are looking for and then later you may be able to write something for your audience for example.

2. Informational and instructional videos

With the implementation of Google’s universal search and blended results, you can make quality video contents that can get your content to rank on the first page of search engine results page. In other words it makes sense to develop not just written content but also video content for your blog.

“Blended search”, by the way, is a new approach of displaying results which has become increasingly common on major search engines. In a blended search, videos, images, maps, news, calendars and other types of results are displayed alongside the standard search results.

You should be aware that a video content designed to take advantage of blended search is one of the best methods to get a first page organic ranking on Google. According to a study, video content is 50 times more likely to get first page rankingson a of blended search results page than standard text.

To do this, create a video targeted to your intended audience, using keywords that your customers are searching for. For example, let’s say your blog is about project management. You can create a video review on The Top 10 Project Management Software Programs. You can use Google’s adwords keyword tool to know the best keywords to use (search on Google for “google adword keyword tool”)

After that, you will want to work on getting the video indexed by search engines so that it will end up on the results page whenever people query for related terms. One way is through creation of links that point towards the video on other websites. For example, you can participate on related blogs, topics or forums and put links there that point to the video (or other resources) you created. Link to the video content from these related blogs and forums. Also link to the video from your blog. Make sure that your video has branding for your blog so that readers will go to your blog after watching the video.

3. Answering questions from potential reader

Community driven Q&A sites and knowledge markets are another great tools that you can use to increase traffic to your blog. Yahoo! Answers, Answers.com, Answerbag.com, Quora and allexperts.com—these are the leading sites that receive around 62 million visits each month. If you can connect to potential customers using well crafted answers to popular, frequently asked questions in community driven sites (even forums), you will have no trouble gaining thousands of visits to your blog.

It’s important to never rush your answers for the sake of posting links to your site. Make sure your answer is informative and well researched.

4. Create a LinkedIn group

Another great tool that you can use to improve the visibility of your blog is LinkedIn. Similar to Twitter, LinkedIn is also a social networking website with over 161 million users as of February 2012. It allows users to build communities wherein members can participate and share content with each other.

When you create a LinkedIn group, it means that you can share your content to everyone in the whole community who may in turn share it, like it, bookmark it, repost it, link to it, etc. Your LinkedIn profile will also be featured to thousands of people on LinkedIn.

Of course, building a LinkedIn group from scratch is not always easy, because it will require a certain amount of time to get enough people to join the community, to build interest, before it can start to gather its own momentum.

That means you may need to hustle to get the membership up to at least 500, even if this means an “I’ll add you, you add me” approach. Even more important is making sure that that the contents you are sharing are something that your community is interested in.

5. Well structured offers of writing content for other blogs

Just like answering questions in community driven Q&A sites, posting content on highly visited blogs is a surefire approach of getting more traffic into your own blog. For one, guest blogging is a good way of exposing your brand to new audiences who have never seen or heard of your brand before. It is also useful in building early links and references back to your site.

To do this, first you need to know which blogs are likely to be read by your intended audiences. For example, Technorati is a good place to blog for time management software like Time Doctor, since it has an active software developer community, and is among the most visited blogs, with over 112.8 million entries and 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

Look for contents that you can write, and then craft an email offering 2 or 4 articles that you can contribute on these blogs. Of course, it goes without saying that you must have unique, quality content appropriate to your target audience, or it can be tough convincing other bloggers to allow you to post on their sites..

Also, try to target sites that have a relevant audience, or you will be wasting your time writing a good piece only to see it fizzle because the audience were not interested.

Don’t have the time to do ANY of these strategies? So actually I designed these strategies so that you can hire a virtual assistant for as little as $4 an hour to do this work for you. So if you’re already a successful blogger this is something you can consider. Or if you have the time to do it, then it’s also something you can work on yourself.

This guest post was written by Robert Rawson, who is the “Chief of Staff” for a company Staff.comthat provides outsourced Staff to companies and even to bloggers that are looking for help with their business.