Blogging as a platform has evolved throughout the years. What started out as a simple “web logging” online diary that was of a personal nature has become a content marketer’s dream. You can literally create a blog in 5 minutes and begin typing away. By the time you have 20-30 blog posts under your belt, you can seriously begin thinking about earning some money from your blog.

But before you can fantasize about making money, you first have to get people to your blog. In the information marketing industry, we call this “traffic”.

In this report, I will show you 25 ways that you can drive traffic to your site in a short period of time. You can expect to see a traffic upswing within a few days, if not sooner.

While doing this may seem a monumental task, it really isn’t, and here’s why. You will be publishing blog posts of varying lengths, ranging from 200 to 1000 words or more, for purposes of training the “search engine bots” to return to your site more frequently, as well as to get yourself in the routine of just writing. Up to this point, right here, I have written 205 words. See? It’s not much.

Hint: You can “curate” information here, by using an excerpt from another site, adding your commentary about it, and publishing. Content curation is an effective blog posting method.

Anchor posts are “evergreen” posts (actually more likely a page in your blog) that will be as topical to your reader today, tomorrow, next week, and next year. They are generally very long posts (>1000 words, can be 2500 or more words). Write about a topic that is important to your blog and keep writing until you have written all you need to say, but nothing more.

Yes, I know you hear this all of the time. The problem is, nobody ever tells you how or which sites to focus on. Start with Facebook and Google+. The noise on other sites just won’t allow your content to shine through. What you do is this: You post your URL on both sites, with additional commentary about the content. Ask a question. Then insert the URL of the post you want to promote. Then finish off with some closing commentary or ask the question slightly differently.

Buffer is a great way to share content on social networking sites like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The web application “stores up” posts that you want to share and publishes them over time. Use this in addition to #3 above, not in place of. You want multiple opportunities for people to see your content, and Buffer is a great way to do that.

There are groups that exist for the sole purpose of promoting your blog posts; in return, you have to share other members’ posts on your own social sites. This works very well because it shows Google and Bing that your content is getting likes, +1s, comments, and shares across a vast network, rather than just you doing all the sharing. Social Buzz Club is one I recommend trying.

This is not what you think. The rage right now is for you to guest blog on other people’s sites, so that you gain more exposure, and guest blogging is very effective. You’ll see it later down the list.

What we are talking about here is you seeking out bloggers who may want to write posts for your blog. This is extremely effective because your guest blogger will write content for you (one less piece you don’t have to write), but he also brings you his audience and reach. He will encourage his followers to visit his guest post, too, which means more traffic to your site. Plus, his followers will likely share, like, and/or +1 his blog post, which is on your site. It’s win-win.

If you run a self-hosted WordPress website, you can install the CommentLuv plugin. This plugin encourages visitors of your site to leave a comment on your blog because it allows them to drop a link back to their own site. Many bloggers seek out CommentLuv-enabled sites just for that opportunity.

When you write a blog post, you can link out to another blog by referencing the URL of the post on that other site. If that site has pingbacks enabled (many don’t), you will get a backlink on that site that appears near the comments for that site. Many readers of that particular post you referred to will click on the pingback link to see what you had to say. It’s sort of a way to comment on another blog site without going to that web site. You make the comment on your site and it gets published on the other site.

Make sure you tell the publisher of the blog that you mentioned in your post that you made reference to a blog post of his. You can do this through email or by using the method in #3 (on Facebook, use the @ symbol and name; on Google+, use the + symbol and name).

Following up on the Pingback suggestion, you can get a flood of traffic simply by visiting authority blogs and making relevant, topical, and meaningful comments. You will get direct traffic by using this method, as others who saw your comment may want to find out more about you. Plus, the blog publisher may take notice of you and open some doors (he may refer back to you in future posts or he may be open to allowing you to write for him – guest blog).

This method can bring you an onrush of traffic. What you do here is write on other people’s sites, with a link in your “bio” or “resource box” back to your blog. People who liked what they read in your guest post will click that link to learn more about you.

The beauty of this method is that you will be curating other people’s content. Pick a handful of blog posts that you read last week that you want to call out on your blog because they were awesome. Use anywhere from 5-10 blog posts from other people (you can throw in one of yours, too, by the way, to give it extra attention) and refer to each with its URL – this way you may get a pingback plus you are making it easy for your readers to navigate to each of your roundup posts.

Again, let the publishers of each of your roundup posts know that you’ve included their site in your roundup. They could very well begin promoting to their followers the fact that they were featured on another blog, thus sending you some direct traffic.

…and post those presentations on SlideShare. You may be amazed at the amount of traffic you get by using this method.

Bonus Tip: Use the embed code from the SlideShare site that they give you to post the presentation on your original post. Just edit your post, add in the embed code, and re-publish.

Same as above. You will get traffic from the world’s second biggest search engine, YouTube.

Same as above. Share on Scribd.

Simple enough, right? Go to Pixabay for free photos. You can find nearly anything here and you don’t have to add credits to the photo or the post. Make sure you optimize your images (title, alt text, description, file name).

It’s a detailed process, but if you use WordPress and have Yoast’s SEO plugin, it’s just a matter of filling in the blanks. Authorship gives you a nice little picture of you in each of your posts in Google’s search engine results pages. The clickthroughs on these is up to 7x greater than results without authorship.

Alltop is a great resource for finding new content. It’s an aggregator, created by Guy Kawasaki. You can submit your site to Alltop and there is a very good chance that it will be accepted.

Empire Avenue is a cross between social networking and stock picking. It feels like a game. But play along because the game could be quite lucrative. The magic happens when you have enough “Eaves” (i.e., “money”) to begin offering “missions” where you ask other EA members to like, share, +1 your content. EA members usually gobble up missions because taking missions gives them more Eaves. You can get a flood of social signals and traffic from using this simple tactic.

Similar to blog commenting, but forum commenting can reach a more targeted audience. In fact, if you seek out problems people seek to solve in forums and supply good, no hype answers, you can get tightly-targeted traffic.

There are various forms of advertising on Facebook. The one you ought to focus on is “promoted posts”. What you do here is post a link on Facebook back to a specific post on your blog. Then, within Facebook, you promote that post.

Pinterest is an amazing online photo gallery. There you can post pictures from your web site that link back to specific posts. People love infographics. So what you do here is either embed somebody else’s infographic (with proper attribution, of course) or make your own (it’s not easy to make a good one, so you may want to hire a graphic artist). Link that picture back to your site. If people find the infographic interesting, they may click on it in Pinterest, which takes them back to your site.

You may be surprised to see how much traffic you can get simply by crafting posts around “long-tail keywords”. Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that are 3 words or more. 4 or 5 word keyword phrases often work really well. The point is that your competitors probably aren’t writing posts around the same 4 or 5 word phrases; but they may be targeting the same 1, 2, or 3 word phrases. You get a better shot at showing up on the first page of Google by creating posts around these long-tail keywords.

Simply search Google for “blog directories” and you will find a number of web sites where you can sign up to have them include your web site in their directory. Often, these directories have high PageRank, which gives any backlinks you get from them powerful, plus, people still use these to find niche-related content, so you may find direct traffic coming from these blog directories.

While article marketing sites took big hits after a couple Google search algorithm updates in 2012, they still are a good source of direct traffic. Somebody may go to eZine Articles, run across an article you wrote, and follow the link in your “resource box” back to your site.

Now, for this one to work, you have to have an email list. Generally, people use Aweber or some other sort of email list service to collect subscribers that they can then keep in touch with, long after the visitor leaves your web site.

Simply send out a broadcast email to your subscribers asking them to take a look at your latest blog post. Typically, you can get about 10 percent to follow your call to action, so if you have a list of 1,000 subscribers, you can expect around 100 people to navigate over to your site.

That’s it. 25 simple ways to bump up the web traffic to your blog.

NOTE: Some of the links above are affiliate links, which means that if you click on one and go on to buy a product or service from that vendor, I will get a small commission for referring you to them. It’s a way for me to earn bits of income. I will note, however, that I actually use the vendors I am affiliated with.