In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else's blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that's about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major "pillar" articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good "how-to" lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn't news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don't have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that's the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you've done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people's blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger's article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it's sort of like your blog telling someone else's blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it's so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it's worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn't bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it's worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your "Resource Box". You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I've listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won't stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I've put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it's certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

Setting up a website for many, is just a matter of fun; it is a place where family and friends exchange notes, information and niceties. However, with time, you the novice, would get bored with just playing post office and begin to think of how to use your website as a money making tool. This is when you would look for aspects that could improve the profitability of your website.

The profitability of your website depends upon two major aspects:

(1) visibility to the surfer and
(2) visibility to the search engines.

Below are ten tips that would help you in your endeavor.

1. Create an easily (user-friendly) website - anyone who lands at your web site should be able to find their way around without too much clicking of the mouse or re-directs. In most cases, if your visitor does not get what they want in three clicks, the fourth click will be out of the website.

2. Offer valuable and qualitative freebies at regular intervals - let people know your website by its high quality freebies. You could give up-to-date information, coupons, discounts, reports, free advice, etc which is highly valued by your customers.

3. Content is king, use it to your advantage. There is nothing that can beat good content yet. Write articles, newsletters, press releases, etc. and submit these at as man directories you can.

4. Provide updates on your products - most of your customers would love to hear about updates on the product or service they normally use. Ensure that they are informed about it. Alert them with an email, which will prompt them, visit your web site.

5. Have the right buttons where they are visible. The "buy it now", "contact us", "email us", "live chat", "ask a quote" buttons should be extremely visible, accessible and always linked well.

6. Have adequate information on each product or service you provide. This would prevent unnecessary doubts, and also convince the customer to buy faster.

7. Ensure high security for payment and other financial transactions. Your customer needs to feel secure when they make payment. Enlist with the best security certificates so your customer is protected from any type of fraud.

8. Use bright and descriptive images. A picture is indeed worth a 1000 words. Remember, you can score double by indexing your picture with keyword names so the engines would read them correctly and use this for ranking.

9. Collect respectable links. Search engines attribute great value to websites linked well. Initially, use reciprocal links until you build quality content so you could link with high-end websites.

10. Constantly work at improving visibility. Whether it is SEO, building links, submitting articles with search engines, advertising for free or payment, and so on, you need to keep at it 24x7. In order to build traffic, you need to work initially almost non-stop.

All this and a lot of hard work until you get your website ranked on the top two SERP (search engine result pages) and you have had it made. It is said that about 75-80% of people find websites trough organic searches. These tips, plus continuous SEO, would get you there and bring you enough traffic to make your website as profitable as it could be.

This article delves into the various ways to make money online. When I first started surfing around on the net 15 or so odd years ago I had no idea that I could actually make money online. But a few years ago as I read more and more stories about the dot com explosion, and eventual collapse, and heard stories about overnight millionaires and slow but steady millionaires I figured "hey if they can do it, why can't I"? And so began my quest into making money on the internet. Surprisingly enough I found that there were basically 3 ways to make money online.

1 ) Sell your own stuff
2 ) Sell other peoples stuff
3 ) Sell ads on your site

Now obviously there are many variations on the above 3 items...but those are basically the main ways to make money online. So if you break those 3 things down you come up with the following options.

1 ) Sell your own stuff.

This can be accomplished in quite a few ways. eBay is one way, cleaning out your attic or garage and putting your stuff up for sale. Purchasing discount or closeout items and selling them on eBay. Creating your own product, crafts, artwork, info products, the latest greatest mousetrap, etc., and then selling it on eBay. You can sell almost anything on eBay, ( I believe body parts are out of the question in case anyone's thinking about selling their extra kidney or anything like that). 8 ) But eBay is only one avenue to sell your stuff.

You can put up a website of your own, or utilize something like eBay stores or PayPal Shops, or any of a number of other storefront options available on the web for setting up shop and selling your stuff.

The main benefit to this option is you pretty much get to keep all the profits for yourself, (unless you are offering affiliate partners a share of the profits), so all the money make you get to keep yourself. And you have complete control of the product you are selling, no worries about whether or not the product is worthwhile or a some junk someone is trying to pawn off on unsuspecting customers.

The main drawback to this is more work. You have to create, buy, or find whatever it is you are going to sell. You have to ship it or make it available for download, or however it is you are going to get your stuff to the buyer. You have to set up a website or pay someone to create your site if you are selling from your own website. You have to deal with customer support, refunds, etc. So in a nutshell more work...but more $$$.

2) Sell other peoples stuff.

This is probably one of the easiest ways to make money online. You can become an affiliate marketer, you advertise somebody's product for them, direct customers to their site, the customer purchases said product, and you get paid a commission from the seller. You don't have to deal with product development, customer complaints, payment processing, etc. All you do is drive traffic to the vendors site and collect your share of the money when they buy.

This is probably the easiest way for newcomers to start out making money online. When you are first starting out you usually don't have a website, or a list to promote and sell to, or a product, or anything actually except a desire to figure out how the heck to make money online! So affiliate marketing is usually a good choice to "get your feet wet" so to speak and start generating an income online

3) Sell other peoples ads on your site.

This is probably one of the hardest ways to make money online in my opinion. At least initially. To be able to sell ad space on your own site you are going to need a pretty large traffic count coming to your site to be able to charge any kind of money for ad space. You are going to be hard pressed to convince anyone to pay any kind of real money to advertise on your website if you don't have a few thousand people dropping by your site on a regular basis.Ads and affiliate marketing are 2 ways to generate money on your blog, and if you can generate enough interest on a topic on your blog you could start getting a good base of traffic coming to your blog. But even with a good topic it's going take a while to generate enough traffic to start selling ad space on your blog.So there you have it. Now you just have to decide which way you want to go. Get out there and do some research into the different venues and see which one appeals to you. Ideally you would eventually branch out into all 3 ways. Remember multiple streams of income is the way to go. You don't want to rely on just one thing if you are looking to replace your daily 9-5 grind with an income from the internet.