If you want comments on your blog, be sure to comment on others. Find a few blogs relevant to your market, subscribe to their updates, and then comment on their articles.

Browse the web – especially the social web – for discussions that interest or affect you. Everything you post doesn’t have to contain a link back to you, but talking with others will raise your brand’s profile.

Guest post on other blogs for more traffic. Ramit Sethi credits this approach to boosting his readership 150,000 in 1 week. Locate other blogs where your target audience spends time, and pitch the blog editor with an article you wrote.

No blog is an island. Leave your little world, and participate in online discussions if you want to increase interest in what you write.

[image credit: aturkus]

Adding an email delivery option to your blog could significantly increase your number of regular readers.

This chart shows my daily blog traffic over the past few weeks. Traffic spikes each Monday, when my Hotel Marketing Strategies weekly email summary goes out:

Could you try something like this for your blog?

It doesn’t have to be time consuming. I use MailChimp to automatically package my posts in a one-email-per week format. (I tried Feedburner, but felt daily updates would be too overwhelming…)

Which is better for blog subscriptions: email or RSS newsfeed?

Email.

Email typically generates a 3-4 times larger subscription base than RSS.

Email usually has a higher engagement rate. People are more likely to read your messages by email, and more likely to click on your links.

Use your blog to focus on building an email list.