1.  Domain Name – If you are going to be successful your domain name must tell your audience exactly what they will find on your blog or website.  This name will be how people refer to you and refer others to you.  Your name should also be easily remembered nothing fancy or catchy needed here just plain and simple usually works the best.  You want people to speak offline about you, tell their friends, etc.

Registering your domain name is the next very important step in creating your business.  Try to have .com ending and the reason is people are the most familiar with it, it is branded in their minds.  They assume all web addresses are .coms although they are not you want them to find you.  You may have a harder time with a .net or others that are out there.  Your domain name should also contain either a keyword or keyword phrase to help increase your search engine optimization and ranking.  Last your domain name should be easy to spell and not to long so it is easy to remember.

2.  Pillar Post Articles – Before you get started invest some time and create 4-5 strong pillar post articles to strengthen and support your blog.  This material should offer information to people on topics like advice, tips, list like top ten or 20 ways to drive traffic to your blog, Definitions, mini-courses, etc.  You want to educate your readers with insightful how to lessons even.  Generally they do not need to be more then 500 words or so.  Saturate each post in good keywords and they will generate good search engine traffic.  You will be creating many pillar post articles the 5 mentioned is only to help you initially as you will be marketing your self and focusing your attention on driving traffic to your website or blog.  You will have the information already created and read to go.  If you are struggling to know what to write about then read about your keyword and niche.  Look at others that have blogs how did they set theirs up what are their pillar posts about.

3.  Blog Commenting – Go out and read other blogs and post comments on them.  Most of the commenting systems allow you to enter your name, email address, and website which are linked to your name.  When you leave a useful comment then someone may click on your link creating visits to your blog. In the beginning you really need to be dedicated and put a schedule together that works for you.  You want to try and make 25 comments a day in various places to get your name out there.  You can try Yahoo Answer, Google Blog search, HubPage, Ezine Articles, Comment Khuana, Forums, Google search or other search engine search on your keyword or products.

4.  Blog Linking and Trackback – When you link or reference another blog in an article you create a trackback to their entry making a link between the two sites.  This truncated summary of your post is left which is similar to one person telling another about you except its one blog telling another blog about you.  Trackbacks often appear like comments.  This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a reader of yours or maybe check back once and awhile sometime bringing in more new readers.

5.  Comments on Your Blog – It is all about marketing right down to this.  People like to see that there are other readers that have left comments on your blog.  They feel then you must have good content since all these people are commenting so they stay a little while and look through your site more.  To encourage commenting on your blog, post a question in a post.  When you do this be sure you respond to the comment promptly so the conversation keeps going gaining momentum.

6.  Daily Blog Post – Try to write something each day.  Set a schedule for your self take two days out of the week and create 2 pillar posts one on Tues and then one on Thursday.   Keep the other days to writing shorter articles.   This establishes to your readers that your blog is updated daily so when they comeback tomorrow they are sure to find some new content posted.  You will see your marketing efforts will slow down soon remember it is in the beginning stages of establishing yourself.  You are driving traffic and picking up speed to achieve those higher rankings with the search engines.  As time goes on the amount of commenting and article writing you will need to do will lessen.  It is important to understand that here online “CONTENT IS KING” and we need to always remember that.  People are online to learn about products before they buy them.  You have to give them the information and knowledge they are searching for before you can convert them into a sale.

7.  Article Writing – Is another great way to form a link back to your site.  Each article should be around 400-500 words not to long where you loose the interest of your reader and not to short where do not give enough to capture the readers attention.  Do not saturate your articles with keywords stick to about 2 times and then once in your title.  Your articles should focus on promoting you and your products.  They will relate to the page you are trying to promote and be informative to help the reader.  The three article sites I use are HubPage, EzineArticles, and GoArticles when submitting articles to.

8.  Blog Carnival – this is a post inside a blog that captures collections of posts/articles from many blogs on a particular topic.  The concept is to collect the best content on a topic for the week.  Do a search at Blogcarnival.com to find the right blog for you and submit your latest pillar post here to get link backs spiking new readers.

9.  Directory Submissions – the easiest way to define a directory is an example of one the Yellow Pages.  Online directories give the search engines an additional place to find content.  Adding your name to a directory is great for a few reasons.  They are searched more often and you then you have possible traffic referrals.  There are both paid and free directory submission sites.  I prefer the free route but as you get more involved and want to really promote your site you may want to consider paid directories.  For now try Directory Critic or search for them on Google.  You can not submit your blog to enough of directories but I would initially start with 100 and then revisit some time in it again later when you come more into a routine and managing your day.

10.  Social Bookmarking Submissions – These are social directories where people look at what you have and bookmark it.  Generally people bookmark sites that they are interested in and plan to return to.  This helps drive unique traffic to your site while getting relevant links.  There are many social bookmarking sites available to start simply do a search on Bookmarking sites and go from there.  Then you have the top ones that are the most popular Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious to mention a few.  There are additional tools you can use which are SocialMarker and IMAutomator.com.  Try to add about 4-5 bookmarks a day till you get about 50 initially.

Just a note there is a program called RoboForm-Form Filler that will help you autofill your information into the forms when submitting your name to the directories and social bookmarking sites.  This will cut your time down to half by using it.