If you are new to the blogging world and have recently thought of starting up your own WordPress blog, then let me give you a “success recipe” that every new blogger must follow to cook up some decent traffic. The following recipe might look overwhelming at the first glance but it can be essential for giving a solid foundation to your blog.

Ingredients required for this recipe :-

• A newly installed WordPress blog (Instructions here)
• A crispy theme (Free Themes – Premium Themes)
• 7 freshly written articles (How to write Articles)
• 4 spicy plugins :- All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, No Ping Wait, Related Posts
• $100 to spend on advertising (If you lack here, go with the free modes of advertising – explained below)
• Finally, a strong will to follow the recipe (I have no resource for this..you are born with it )

I have spread this recipe through a week’s schedule, so be patient and take it easy. I can promise you that at the end of this period, you will see a good stream of visitors on your blog. So, munch on..

Day 1

Install your blog theme and configure all the plugins mentioned above (you can get help with the plugin installation by going to the particular plugin’s homepage). Now, download this WordPress SEO Guide and setup your blog as per the instructions in the e-book. Post your first article on the blog. Keep in mind that the title of your article plays a vital role in capturing the attention of the search engine spiders, so keep it relevant. Also, make sure that you choose the right categories and tags when making the post. These should be in accordance with your articles’ content because these are your blog’s keywords. And finally, find and use a good picture to go along with the article.

Go to Gravatar.com and sign up for a new account. Upload your picture and set your blog’s URL. Now, go to 10 popular blogs and leave comments on their posts. Normally, the blogs will allow you to enter your blog’s URL so do that too. Also, make a note of the blogs where you commented because you have to comment on 10 different blogs every day during this recipe.

We are done for Day 1.

Day 2

Sign up for a Google account (if you don’t have one already), and enlist your XML sitemap on Google Webmaster Tools. The sitemap helps the search engines to quickly index your blog’s content. Also, add your blog’s URL on Google Analytics to monitor your traffic and visitors. Finally, go to Google URL adding service and add your blog’s URL for indexing on Google.com.

You can try your hands on some promotion work today. Write up a 500 word article about your blog (like a short review) which should contain information on your blog’s niche, what you write about, and why someone should visit your blog. Now, go to this services section of Digitalpoint forums to get someone to submit your article to various article directories. (I am using Digitalpoint forums for this purpose but you can use any other webmaster forums that you like). Usually, the going rate is $10 for submitting to around 500+ article directories but you can get better rates if you look hard. This exercise will help you build some good incoming links for your blog. But beware of the scam artists who lurk around in such forums. Only assign work to people who have good iTrader ratings . If you cannot afford to spend money on this part, you can submit your article yourself to different article directories. Find a list here :- Article Directories (Excel format).

To do : Post your second article on the blog. Leave comments on 10 popular blogs. Day 2 over.

Day 3

Go to the services section once again and get a directory submission service done for your blog. Through directory submissions, you can list your blog URL in many Web directories that are operating all over the Internet (for example, DMOZ, Yahoo Directory). On Digitalpoint forums, you can get a manual submission to 1000+ directories for around $30-$40. The submitter will usually give you a report at the end of the process. The acceptance ratio to these directories is around 40%-50%, but once again, this is good for link building.

If you don’t want to spend money on this service, you can also do it yourself. Here is a Directory List

To do : Post your third article on the blog. Leave comments on 10 popular blogs. Day 3 over.

Day 4

Open up Google.com and search for forums and communities that are related to your area of blogging. For example, if you blog about finance, search for the term “Finance Forums” or “Money Forums”. Pick the most popular ones (around top 10) in your niche and become a member of all those forums. Forums usually let you mention your site’s URL in the profile signatures, so go ahead and update your forum signatures with your blog’s link. From now on, make sure that you post regularly (Posting means replying to existing threads or creating your own new threads) in 10-12 such forums every day until the recipe is over. This should not be too difficult a task assuming that this is your area of expertise.

Over the time, the incoming links from these forums will give a lot of search engine value to your blog.

To do : Post your fourth article on the blog. Leave comments on 10 popular blogs. Day 4 over.

Day 5

Its now time to do some link exchange for your blog. Make a links section on your blog that you will be using to list external sites with whom you exchange links. Now, go to the Link Exchange section and start a thread to invite people for link exchange activity (read existing threads to learn how people do it). Exchange links with around 8-10 new sites every single day of this blogging recipe. This might prove to be difficult initially as people do not want to exchange links with a newly established blog but, press on. You can also join other webmaster forums if you like to diversify things.

Link exchange process will help you get additional traffic from external websites and you will not be totally dependent on search engines for your traffic needs.

To do : Post your fifth article on the blog. Leave comments on 10 popular blogs. Makes posts in 10 new forums. Day 5 over.

Day 6

Go to StumbleUpon Advertising and sign up as an advertiser. StumbleUpon can help you in getting some targeted traffic for your blog but this service costs money (What is StumbleUpon?). You can add funds to your account and set up a limit to the daily visitors to your blog. The traffic rate is $5 for 100 unique visitors. If you have good content on your blog, many visitors will like to bookmark your blog and come back to it again. So, go ahead and spend the rest of your budget for this advertising method. You can set the spending limit to $5 per day (for a start) which will instantly start sending traffic to your blog. You can also pause the campaign anytime you want and have a look at the visitor statistics. This advertising technique will help your blog in getting more exposure and people in your niche will know about your blog.

To do : Post your sixth article on the blog. Leave comments on 10 popular blogs. Makes posts in 10 new forums. Exchange links with 8-10 new sites. Day 6 over.

Day 7

This is the final day for the recipe. By this time, you should already be getting visitors through the StumbleUpon advertising program. You can check your Google Analytics account for the number of visitors and referrer statistics. If you did everything correctly, your blog’s URL will also be indexed on the Google search engine (try searching for it).

You can now concentrate on getting your articles bookmarked on social networking sites like Digg, deli.cio.us, Reddit, etc. Here is a list of social bookmarking websites where you can create accounts and submit your posts. If you have viral content, you can even make it to the front pages of these sites.
To do : Post your seventh article on the blog. Leave comments on 10 popular blogs. Makes posts in 10 new forums. Exchange links with 8-10 new sites. Day 7 over.

Please write your comments and let me know how you like this recipe.