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There are plenty of ways to get traffic to your blog, but not all traffic is made equal. In order to build a financially successful blog, you need to attract the right kind of traffic.

After all, it doesn’t matter what your hit counter says if visitors aren’t sticking around to help your blog grow (and make money).

The right kind of visitors to your blog should be:

* Interested in your niche topic;
* Ready to place your blog’s information to use;
* Excited enough about your blog to tell others about it.

In small, you should be using techniques to get targeted visitors to your blog, instead of just worrying about the numbers. It’s much better (and more profitable) to have 100 targeted visitors coming to your blog every day than it is to get 1,000 untargeted visitors a day.

Here are 5 ways you can streamline the promotion of your blog to focus on getting more targeted traffic:

#1 Participate in discussion boards and forums that are related to your niche.

Topic-specific forums are gifts for the internet marketer, because they give you immediate access to a group of people who are already interested in your subject matter. The hard work has already been done for you – all you have to do is build relationships with other members of the forums, and they will naturally want to visit your blog to get more information.

A word of caution when using niche forums and discussion boards: Don’t make all of your posts about you. In fact, very small, if any, of what you say in a forum should directly promote your blog. That is what your signature line is for. Add value to the discussions, be genuinely interested in what other members have to say, and you’ll get quite a few clicks via your signature line.

#2 Leave meaningful comments on related blogs.

Commenting as a means of promotion has fallen out of favor with internet marketers as of late, largely because it is time consuming, and because most blogs are no-follow, meaning your comments don’t directly help your Google PageRank or search engine rankings.

It’s right that blog commenting won’t bring you floods of traffic. What it will bring you, but, is a steady stream of visitors who have learned something from your comments, and who want to visit your blog to find out more.

The key is making sure your comments are meaningful. This is where most bloggers get bone idle, and then wonder why commenting isn’t bringing any traffic. Comments should real value to the post – if you can add insight that the blog poster didn’t include, expound on a point in the post, or offer alternative suggestions and thoughts, your comments will go a long way toward helping you establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

Often, you’ll even attract the attention of the blogger who wrote the post, which can bring guest posting opportunities, inbound links, and other treasures that will help you bring in even more targeted traffic.

#3 Build your own social network.

Well loved social networks such as MySpace and Facebook can be excellent for promoting your blog, but when you make your own social network, you can tailor it to your niche. If building a social network from the ground up isn’t within your reach (this requires a greater investment of time and money than most new bloggers are willing to make), you can easily make your own niche-specific social network on Ning.

The advantage of having your own social network is that, as the owner, you automatically achieve “authority” status. Who would make a topic-specific social network if they weren’t experts in their niche? (Quite a few would, really, but the vital thing is the perception of authority – that by virtue of owning a social network, members see you as being an expert.)

#4 Get a proper domain name.

This should be obvious, but I’m constantly surprised at how many marketers promote blogs with .blogspot and .wordpress extensions. This gives the impression that you aren’t serious about your blog, so it turns off people who are serious about learning about your niche.

Ideally, your domain name should contain the main keyword your blog is targeting. This will help your blog gain better search engine rankings, and it will also make it clear to potential visitors what your blog is all about.

Proper domain names can be bought for $10 per year or less, but the value a excellent domain name can add to your blog is priceless.

#5 Keep your post content consistent.

If you’re running a blog about wine, you don’t want visitors to land on a post about your vegetable garden. This confuses visitors and leaves a terrible first impression – and for a confused visitor, the first impression is the only one your blog will ever make.

This isn’t to say there shouldn’t be variety in your blog posts – no one wants to read the same thing day after day – but your posts should somehow relate back to the main topic of your blog. Using the above example, this might mean suggesting a particular type of wine to go with a fresh vegetable plate, or explaining how gardening is similar to winemaking.

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