Unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog there’s a very good chance that there is initially only one loyal reader of your new blog – you!

Here are the top 6 ways to increase your blog traffic for new bloggers who have near-to-no audience at the moment and would like to get a jumpstart on things.

1.      Write more solid articles – the single most important thing you can do to get your blog noticed and increase your readership is to have solid articles in place. Aim for one solid article per week and at the end of the year you will have a database of more than 50 feature articles that will bring in more readers.

2.      Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com – a great strategy is to submit your articles to article directories such EzineArticles.com. To increase the visibility of your blog, you don’t want to go chasing the traffic. You want to find out where the traffic is and get yourself in front of it. EzineArticles.com has 30+ million unique visitors a month searching for articles in specific categories for your specific information. This is a great way to connect with your target audience.

3.      Submit to blog directories – whilst this tip might not bring you a ton of new readers, it’s easy to do and only take a few minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites and find the category that fits your blog and submit it. Then copy and paste a couple of lines of code to your blog so you can rank and that’s it. Over time you’ll see your blog climb the rankings creating another source of traffic for your blog

4.      Encourage comments on your own blog – when you can show that you have loyal readers on your blog this convinces someone to become a loyal reader as well. If they see people commenting on your blog they will conclude that your content must be good. You can encourage comments by posing a question in a blog post. Remember to always respond to comments so you keep the conversation going.

5.      Start commenting on other blogs – one way to find the right readers for your blog is to aim to comment on other blogs with a similar niche topic to yours. Chances are the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

6.      Use a proper domain name – be serious about what you name your blog. Something that’s easy for people to remember makes it easy for them to spread the word about your blog. A .com is always your best choice if available and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than having the correct keywords. If you can manage to make the keywords work in the domain name that’s also easy to remember then that’s the ideal.

I hope this has given you some food for thought about getting some traffic to your new blog. If you’ve used other methods that have proven successful for you, please send us a comment. We’d love to know!

Google just introduced new features to their search results that brings a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web.  Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before.  When they are relevant, Google will show the most recent posts towards the top of the search results page.

Where do the feeds come from? Google announced official partnerships with the following web entities; Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca to power their aggregate real-time feeds.

Get a first look at the new search interface and some sample searches.

So the big, very big question is what does this mean?  More spam unfortunately. More attempts by affiliate marketers to skew the system in their favor and more automated recycling of posts to always have a presence in real time results. It’s not going to be a bed of roses while the search engines get to grips with reputation management of the contributors that author content on these new partners. We know that Twitter’s user profile management is basic at best. Silly algorithms that weight banal factors as negatives or positives can easily be circumvented and before you know it you’re being stuffed with affiliate cookies and pimped malware for having clicked on what you thought was a legitimate real-time search result from your ‘trusted’, favorite search engine Google.

Moving away from the pessimistic side of what will happen, there will be advantages. More so for mobile search’s integration of real-time results. That’s another post however.

Anyway, real-time is  rolling out over the next few days and when you have it, you’ll see it just happening withing your search results.