However, due to the numerous ways available, the whole process can be extremely tedious without a systematic or automated way of doing this. Below is my own step-by-step system which, while not fully automated, can be used to reach out to a wider audience quickly and instantly, for each of your blog posts.

#1 - Submit the post as an article to article submission sites
Article submission sites are guaranteed traffic generators for well-written articles, usually on an average of between 1-200 visitors a day. If your post has been written like an article, do not hesitate to submit it to sites like ArticlesBase.com. However, do note that article sites require good content, and not just something from a daily muse.

#2 - Publish Feedburner feed(s)
Ensure your posts have been published using RSS feeds, such as Feedburner.

#3 - Use Squidoo
Create Squidoo lenses for each keyword in your post, if it has not already been done. Then add your blog RSS feed in the lens. This will place your post to the eyes of anyone who visits you via Squidoo.

#4 - Stumble the post and Squidoo lens
StumbleUpon.com is a social bookmarking site which provides a browser tool bar from which you can bookmark your site's pages. It helps to generate massive amounts of traffic to your site, especially if you provide content which people find useful. As a result, more people will review and bookmark your site, creating much exposure, possible backlinks and a subsequent readership.

Once you have set up the tool bar, use the "I Like It!" button to bookmark and review the site page with your post.

#5 - Submit to OnlyWire and other social bookmarking sites
There is an increasing number of social bookmarking sites available today which provides massive potential for traffic generation. In order to submit your post to each of them requires considerable effort and time. Wouldn't it be a great timesaver if there was a tool that could automate this?

With OnlyWire, this can be achieved to a certain extent. At the moment, OnlyWire allows instant submission of your post to up to 22 social bookmarking sites. You will still need to have your own account at each of these sites, and key in your account name and password into OnlyWire. But after that, all you need to do is to bookmark your post using OnlyWire, and it will help to submit your post to all the 22 sites and a global audience.

If you are part of other sites like Digg.com (which is not on OnlyWire), do the necessary submission to those sites as well.

#6 - Ping Technorati
Technorati is often known as the authority of the latest buzz on the World Wide Web. If you have an account with Technorati and have added the necessary widgets, Technorati will ping your site upon adding a new post.

#7 - Write a WTF (Where's The Fire?) on Technorati
WTFs are short articles or excerpts on Technorati that are often used to spread the word on practically everything. They are frequently exposed on Technorati's main page and can be voted on by people. If your post or article is of great content, write a short WTF and post it on Technorati. This can provide residual traffic as well, since popular WTFs can remain on the Technorati homepage for a long while.

#8 - Alert your blog communities of new content
People who have joined your blog communities in MyBlogLog for example, are definitely keen on visiting your blog for content. Do them a service, inform them of your new post and they will drop by.

There are many other platforms on which you can leverage on to generate free traffic through various media - such as Yahoo! Answers, YouTube, Flickr, Google Alerts and the countless Web 2.0 sites sprouting up all over the Internet.The above 8 steps are just the main methods which I use to quickly and systematically spread my posts to a wider audience, using such platforms. Use and integrate them into your own methods where applicable and useful, and pretty soon traffic generation will become second nature with more visitors to your site!

Labels: Article Marketing, blogging, Internet Marketing, Social Bookmarking, Traffic