Getting traffic to your blog can be very difficult. Sometimes it feels like all the time you spend promoting your website is wasted. You start to promote your site and you look at your site stats and you notice nothing at all has changed. It can get very depressing.

It doesn't have to be this way anymore. In this article we will tell you the top ways to grow your blog and increase your traffic.

Guest Posting – Guest posting is a very useful tactic. You can bring in the readers of the website you are writing for and get them over to your website. If the readers are in your niche they will most likely end up being loyal fans.

Make sure the article you provide is very informative and useful to the sites readers. Don't just self-promote. Try to make sure that people when people have read your article they go back more informed about the subject they were reading on.

Put Social Media Buttons on Content – To make your content shareable you should add social media buttons to your articles and content. This way it will make your content easier to share and gain more popularity on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Reddit.

Getting featured on the front page of websites like Reddit, Digg or StumbleUpon can significantly increase your websites traffic stats and bring in thousands of visitors in a day.

Encourage users to share your content if they find it helpful or if they have enjoyed it. This way word will get out more about your content and you will gain more popularity.

Invest in the list - Having an email list is really important to any online business. You can get an email list for a couple of dollars a month with Aweber or if you want a free alternative, you can choose MailChimp, which lets you have up to 2,000 email subscribers for free.

Once you have a good amount of subscribers to your email list you can start to promote a product, services and affiliate products to your subscribers and readers. You can make tons of money of your list.

Give out free stuff – Who doesn't like free stuff? Giving out free stuff will help you bring more readers in while also giving readers a preview of your content and what else you have packed in for them.

Your freebies can be anything from ebooks, audio courses and video courses or a mixture of the three. Try to keep it limited to digital products because it is easier to send. I guarantee you will start to see a change in traffic when you start offering free products.

Make Lists – These are short and simple. They may be clichéd post types but they work like a charm. If you make a list type post or a tutorial or guide on how to do something, it will usually be popular. These help people to solve their problems.

People love lists and they rank well in search engines. They are also usually easy to type up. It wouldn't take long to type up a list article.

Or if you don't want to write it yourself you could hire a freelancer from Elance or Fiverr and get them to do it.

Run Competitions – If you run competitions on your blog or your Facebook page and give away some e free stuff, this is a great incentive for people to enter. You would get surprised at how much people get competitive when trying to win something.

You can get your users to design a new logo for your website or business and choose a logo out of them. Once you choose a user, you can give them a free copy of your new eBook or any other prize you can give.

If you want abit of help on running these competitions check out Rafflecopter, Offerpop or Woobox. They take care of running the competitions on your Facebook page or Competition.

Publish YouTube videos – If you make good informative videos which answer your viewer's questions and it gets popular, this converts to massive traffic to your site. You will start to get a lot more traffic.

Youtube is one of the most popular sites in the world and receives millions of hits from all over the world. If you tap into the traffic of YouTube you can potentially get thousands and thousands of hits.

Post on Forums and other blogs -  Become active on forums related to your niche. Do a simple search on Google for forums related to your niche.

To do this go no Google and type in [your niche] forums and it will come up with dozens of forums to do with your niche For example if I was to have a blog to do with business, I would type into Google 'business forums' and it would come up with a dozen forums.

Then you can just register to a couple and starting posting helpful and resourceful stuff. Start helping the community out by answering other peoples queries on forums. Contribute to the conversation.

Don't just self-promote. This is usually frowned upon in forums and may end up getting you suspended.

Post your website link and a little bio into the signature. This way when people find a post from you useful, they will click onto your website to find out more. Equals more traffic to your website.

Also you will get backlinks that will help you to rank into Google and other search engines. So for example, if someone is searching for help on starting their business, they will come across my post on a business forum on how to start up your own business.

The same applies to blog posting. To find a couple of blogs in my niche I would have to search on Google, 'business blogs' and it would come up with a bunch of business blogs. Then I would just click on a couple of different articles from various blogs and comment helpful and useful comments. I would join the discussion.

Fill out the information and enter your website URL into the website part. Then when someone comes across your comment and likes what you say, they will click onto your website. This way you get way more traffic.

Google and other search engines also rank blog comment posts well and you will receive traffic from them.

Conclusion

I hope this list was off help to you. Obviously these aren't the only techniques you can use to market your blog and get more traffic, there are a lot more. We have missed out quite afew but have included the best methods.

If you use the methods mentioned in this article you can get a whole bunch of new visitors to your site.

If this article helped you out, I would appreciate if you could share on social media sites.

If you have any of your own methods of growing your blog or growing your business then please share it with us in the comment section below.

Author Bio
This is a guest post by Adnan Ramzan, the founder of themarketingguy.net, a blog on business, entrepreneurship and marketing. He also has a book available on Amazon titled, The Success Story: Discover and Learn How Ultra Successful People Work and Achieve the Results they Want.