6. Increase Blog Traffic By Making Friends.

I am feeling top of the world right now. Four months ago I started my blog with the hopes of sharing my ideas about business and personal development.  I have been slowly working at trying to write some quality posts, submit to some blog carnivals and get people coming to my site. In the last month and a half I have been averaging about 35 page views a day, but yesterday my page views jumped 10 times to 350.  Though I like to feel that I have been writing some quality (though grammatically flawed) pieces, there has to be a more valid reason for the incredible jump. Especially since I haven’t been on a carnival or linked to in the past week.
I believe I know the cause, and I think it can not only improve awareness of your own blog, but it can also enhance your life.
Is called MAKING FRIENDS.
I learned along time ago that the key to building friendships is not by becoming a great talker, but by becoming a great listener.
Two night ago I had the privilege of meeting some really inspiring people. I went to a MESH gathering, to learn about blogging. I went with the intention of absorbing what other people had to share. I didn’t want to talk about me at all, they were the Teachers, I was the student. Not only did I come out with some great tips on blogging, but I also began to form some friendships with these amazing people. People who I look forward to hanging out with next week at something called DemoCamp.
And what did these friends do the next day? We posted about each other and linked to each other. We told our readers about friends (new and old) who made an impression on us, and our readers – who are interested in the people we find interesting –  clicked on all the links to read about us.ÂÂ
And because these bloggers I met have thousands of visitors a day, I had a lot of new eyes coming to my sight.
Now it’s not for everybody to go out to bars and events to meet new friends, but I would like to suggest something that you could do to build friendships in the blogosphere.
Apply the same rules of friendship building when commenting on other blogs. Many bloggers do one of two things when posting comments, they either rapidly go through dozens of blogs and type  “Hi cool site” with a link to their blog in the hopes of getting some link density and improve their rankings (for those of you that do this stop wasting your time this  type of comment gets deleted reflexivley), or they leave a fairly long comment with their opinion (ie. talk about themselves) in the hopes of people reading their comments and checking out their blog.
-The second approach can be effective but it only works if a reader decides to see the comments and scroll through dozens of them and maybe see yours.
What you really want is to become friends with the blogger and you do this by using your comments to become a listener.
Next time you go to a blog that interests you. Read the posts, not with the intention of responding with your own opinion (talking) but with the intention of hearing what the blogger has to say (listening). Then in your comment, paraphrase what you learned from the post and the positive effect it had on you (Be sincere. If you are phony you will fail).
Do this a and you will soon find yourself having a dialogue with many bloggers. And soon they will be reading your posts and telling their friends about you.
Good Luck