20 Tips to Promote Your New Blog

1. Make it possible for your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed. A good place to sign up is with the popular FeedBurner. Place the RSS feed button in a highly visible place, preferably at the top of your page. If you want to show off how many readers you have, wait until you have 50+. Experiments have shown that people don't sign up to blogs with few RSS readers!

2. Ping your blog as often as possible!

3. Sign up with Technorati, and start making friends with other users. This will help you to get a higher authority and more readers to your blog.

4. Submit your blog to as many directories as possible. BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog are both great places for this.

5. Join forums related to your niche, and add your link in forum signatures. (Do NOT spam, it has no good effect whatsoever)

6. Add your quality posts to social bookmarking sites as Reddit, Del.icio.us and Digg. If you reach the top, you will recieve massive amounts of traffic!

7. Affiliate with other bloggers in your niche (link exchange)

8. Research on SEO (search engine optimization), and make sure you use the right keywords for your blog.

9. Use your link on MySpace and Facebook. Both networks have a massive amount of users online everyday.

10. Have contests. This will make your readers come back, and there is nothing better than returning traffic.

11. Comment on other people's blog (once again; do NOT spam them)

12. A good design is very important. It's the first thing you see when entering, and if users do not find your design/layout trustworthy, they will not return. Avoid a lot of widgets and useless javascripts on your page, it makes it look cheap, and frankly, it's annoying!

13. Get backlinks! And loads of them...

14. Join blog carnivals for fast popularity

15. Make business cards with your url and pass them around

16. Stick to ONE niche. It can easily be too wide and readers will be confused

17. Analyze your blog statistics and take action if needed. Use Google Analytics

18. Sign up to BlogRush for traffic-sharing

19. Newer blogs can use blogsurfing to get a little traffic. BlogExplotion and BlogMad are classics and have a lot of users.

20. Last but not least; QUALITY CONTENT! No reader will return if they feel your content is crappy. Be unique, utter your opinion and write well!