A blog can be a great marketing tool. Of course people need to see your blog first.

A blog can be a great marketing tool. Of course people need to see your blog first.

There are many ways to achieve that. Writing quality content and take the time to ad proper tags to your post is the best way for long lasting results. There are several SEO widgets for Wordpress available, however you need some basic knowledge on SEO and keyword research to make it work for your blog. However this time is well invested because it will give long lasting results.

Write relevant comments on other peoples blog is a great way to get backlinks to your blog (or another site). With relevant I mean a comments that ads value; a comment nothing more than "thank you" or "very nice" does not qualify, neither does direct promotion of your own opportunity unless the post specifically ask for resources: by promoting your own stuff on other peoples blog you will result in the opposite, you will be marked as a spammer.

Widgets of all kinds can get you more followers and exposure. I.e the ones from networkedblogs, google and alike. The widgets of IBO (example) and APSense are great too since they show latest articles/pages/blogs. Ad advantage of IBO blogs is that he shows up in several blog promotion services, Twitter and in digital newspapers.

Blogs in traffic exchanges normally do not work so well since people are focused on earning credits, not reading blogs. Therefore I think Blog Clicker, a new exchange for blogs, is a nice additional possibility to get your blog in front of people.

I surf this new blog traffic exchange single, not in tabs. To earn credits to expose my own blog of course but also follow some that interest me and to write some comments on issues I know something about.

Finally I would like to encourage all bloggers to take a skeptic look at your blog to see what can be improved or added. Personally I like WordPress based blogs most because the offer the greatest variety in templates, add-ons and widgets including ones for SEO. 

A note to WP blogs: The best is to have you self hosted WP blog because than you full control + it is better for SEO and branding. Although there are many tutorials online, WP can be a bit overwhelming and you may want to try out first if you are able to work with WP before setting up a domain for it. A good place to start are the ones you can create as a PinOpps Pro member. When you decide later to switch to self hosted you can transfer your blog with the export function.

However Blogger has been improved a lot also in regards to layout.
However when surfing blogs I saw a lot of blogs without useful widgets for sharing and blog promotion. I also saw many with the standard lay-out which are pretty dull. Headers are the first thing that people see so having a professional lay-out with a header that gives a good impression what the blog is about can be the difference for people to leave tour blog or explore it further. If you need a customized header for your blog or site please visit Webmiep Graphics.

For any blog goes that you need to update it from time to time, the more often, the better. If you have no new subject to write about you can see if you can enhance existing posts by adding new information or to respond on comments. An other idea is to invite guest bloggers.

Currently I have 2 blogs I am most active on, my blog for Newbie Marketers and a the SBT Traffic Blog.

Addition

Monetize your blog by displaying ads.

Many bloggers use google ads for that.  However you may not know that Google has in their TOS that their ads may not be displayed on sites/blog that participate in traffic exchanges. Many publishers found that out the hard way, they lost their account and their earnings. However there are alternatives for blogs/sites that want both, earn from ad revenue and participate in exchanges.

A good option is also to add one of the many WP plugins that allow you to show your own ads. Unless available by default in a service you need a self hosted blog to import these plug ins.

I have not really looked in this matter in full. Personally I use text/banner codes from surf-bar-traffic on most of my sites. And Google on those that are not in exchanges.

One I know of is AdsClickMedia.