Once you have set up your blog, given it an appropriate appearance, and added some interesting content you are ready to go.
However, how do you get people to pay an initial visit to see what you have to offer? There are many different strategies used to accomplish this goal and a lot of diverse opinion about what works best.
However, one idea that is both popular and ethical is called "Oil Rig Hopping" and relates to visiting other people's blogs.
The basic idea is that you go to other blogs, preferably ones related to your business or niche, and leave relevant comments on their blogs with links to your blog as part of the comment.
These comments should not be sales pitches or off topic, but directly related to the blog you are commenting on.
Just include a link to your blog in the comment.
Assuming you make an insightful or interesting comment, other visitors to that particular blog will follow the link you included back to your blog.
The great thing about this practice is that everyone wins.
The owner of the blog you posted the comment on gets a good comment that illustrates the success of their blog and the people that follow your link back presumably learn about a new resource, your blog.
For you personally, you get three benefits from "Oil Rig Hopping".
First and foremost, assuming your comment is interesting and attracts attention, hopefully you will receive more natural, or organic, traffic back to your blog.
As long as the blog you posted the comment on was related to your industry it is a fairly safe assumption that many of its regular readers will also be interested in what you have to say or offer.
Attracting visitors by contributing something useful or meaningful to the overall discussion is much better than using many of the less ethical or trickier means available.
Second, one of the factors that search engines, meta crawlers and blog ranking bots take into account is the number of external links it finds to your website.
That is, the number of times and places that your URL appears on websites and blogs other than your own.
The more external links you have, the better you look to these programs and the better your ranking will be.
Third, and finally, this process helps more fully integrate yourself and your marketing efforts into the larger industry.
Since you are visiting other successful blogs in your own industry, you may very well come across new trends, tricks, or controversies and as long as you actually read the articles in order to comment intelligently upon them, you may discover all kinds of useful things.
Similarly, if you leave good, thought provoking comments that complement the other person's blog, there is a good possibility of getting to know these other people personally and perhaps even partnering with them in some respect.