You have a new blog and you want to be read by thousands of people. But how to get them to your blog?

For start you must have some posts. Search engines and people must read something on your blog. So if you don’t have content add some before start promoting the blog. Remember if the content is high quality people will talk about your blog to other, that brings you extra free traffic.

So let us start promoting the blog.

1. Let search engine know you exist.

The idea is to get the search engines come and index your site. There is a free service that submits your blog in 20 search engines. All you have to do is to choose the desired search engines where you want the blog to appear, write the url and a valid email address. You may submit from http://www.freewebsubmission.com.

2. Submit your blog to blog directories

Submitting to blog directories will help you increase the number of visitors, your page rank and your search engine position. Submit in as many blog directories as you can.

3. Submit your blog to general and niche directories

Submitting general and niche get a better search engine position and will increase the number of readers for your blog. For directory submission you can use a software tool to automatize the process and save weeks of work. You can gat a free trial for the software from http://www.submiteaze.com/index.jsp?aff=137.

4. Submit you feeds to Rss directories

Submit your blog to all of the directories listed at http://www.rss-feeds-directory.com/blog_lists.html to get extra traffic.

5. Use social bookmarks

Adding social bookmark links to your blog makes it easy for your visitors to save and share your content. There is a free tool to make social bookmarks: http://www.toprankblog.com/tools/social-bookmarks.

6. Use Article Directories

Article directories can be a great resource for articles to post on your blog. Here are a few: http://ezinearticles.com, http://goarticles.com, http://www.knowledge-finder.com
http://www.informit.com/articles.

7. Start a press release campaign

When you have enough content on your blog start a press release campaign. You will find a lot of press release distributors just using a search engine.

8. Place the link and description of your blog in your signature

So that any posts to forums, outgoing emails, auto responder courses will promote your blog.

9. Locate blogs with a lot of traffic and place useful comments in their comment box.

Be sure the blog and your comments are relevant to both your blog and theirs. Senseless posts won't help you, they'll hurt you.

10. Use ping services

Pinging will alert different search engines that your blog has updated. So the crawlers will come and index your new post. They crawl and index your site and your blog gets more visitors. The ping tool that I recommend is http://autopinger.com.

All this techniques I have personally used with success on my blog http://www.gadgets-club.com. This gadget blog was launched in January 2007 and attracted 6016 visits in less than 20 days.
Remember to make a blog post as often as possible. More than once a day is not really necessary.

Success.