If you want to keep visitors interested in your content, you have to get them involved. You don’t necessarily have to get them involved by commenting on your posts, or your content, you can of course get them talking about what interests them. You can use Chat plugins for your blog, or forums – you can even separate all these things and have a multi-function blog. However, one seriously good method of keeping visitors coming back, is by allowing them to rate certain topics or conversation points in your posts. There are various tools set up now whereby you can add rating systems into your post (contextually), and further add functionality to your posts.

When you are writing about Google and a cool SEO method, you could simply add in these little tooltip features, where they encourage the visitor to comment on Google, or on SEO.. or anything else in the post. A website called Blippr is getting a lot of attention from the big blogs like Mashable etc. and they are growing rapidly. They will insert small smileys in the content of your post, next to the words you specify. People can then leave their opinion about the topic. When you allow visitors to do something like this, they feel part of the blog, and part of its upkeep. This means they will more thank likely return, and continue adding to the blog’s content in true Web 2.0 style.

You could of course simply allow visitors to rate your posts. Rating System allows you to add a five star review feature at the footer of each post, and this can be beneficial to both you and your visitors. They will see a highly rated topic on your site and want to read it, and furthermore get involved. This will pay dividends in future residual traffic.

When you are looking for relevant places to advertise your website, you cannot really get much better than forums. They are a minefield for some people, but if you learn how to use them properly, and within the rules of the particular forum, they can be a goldmine. If the forum allows signatures, then you can put a link to your website in there and get some traffic flowing to your site for nothing. It will only cost your time, and will pay you dividends over many years. Your link will be on the internet as long as the forum is alive, and considering some big forums have been online since 1995 and going strong – it is genuinely a good investment of time.

If you can be the guy that provides the answers to people, then you can certainly be the one who gets a lot of traffic. People respect others who help people out, and if you can be that guy – then you will get the traffic. All you need to do is look for the questions that people are asking the most, and then go and research the product/service. You can usually find answers on places like Yahoo! Answers or Wikianswers. There’s also millions of online blogs. If you are willing to do the digging, and you enjoy helping people, this could end up being your sole source of traffic. A lot of people get traffic daily by helping people like this. If you get a reputation for being the forum’s ‘go to guy’, people are more likely to take what you say as authoritative, and any link you post will be followed. This is a good place to be.

If you cannot find the answer to a question, you can still actually participate in the conversation, by doing a little research on the niche, and then posting a comment. Even this has the capability to get traffic.