@craigdesmarais I always went for other bloggers in my target audience – commented on their posts, connected with them on Twitter / Facebook, then interacted with their posts. Sometimes you’ll see results immediately: people will start coming to your website, commenting on your content, sharing your stuff on social media, buying your products, etc. Other times, you might think they’re ignoring you, but then you run into them at a conference and they recognize you and tell you what good work your doing or you’ll get a tweet out of the blue months later. It’s really about finding ways to put yourself in front of your target audience in a way that they just can’t miss you.

@craigdesmarais Niche forums can help, depending on your niche. My husband gets a good bit of traffic from photography forums when he’s actively posting within them, for example. It really depends on the forum though – if there are more SEO  spammers than real, active members, then you don’t get as good of results. 

@kathybernard I get decent referral traffic from LinkedIn using a similar method of posting to groups, I will have to read up on the tactic in that link thanks!

@kristi-hines I will be posting in a lot of self-improvement, leadership, social media forums so hopefully this helps bring some quality readers to my site so I can build some passionate fans. 

@kathybernard- I recently posted links to Linkedin groups. There has been considerable discussion on the linkedin site but it hasn’t transferred to my blog! Thanks for the links

Laura, Regarding your comment about LinkedIn group discussion not generating traffic to your blog. I’ve learned through trial and error to just add enough of an interesting tease in the LinkedIn group discussion to get them to go to your blog.

Consider how Yahoo.com lures people into clicking its news stories. For example, they will write, ”Sinful surprise in mouthwatering burger” to lure people into going to its news page to see what the surprise is so it can count the clickthrough. Yahoo would get a lot less clicks if it just told people that butter was the secret ingredient in the tease.

I also suggest always including a signature at the end of your group discussion posting. I use the following (even if I am just responding to something to build my blog’s brand and generate traffic) …

Kathy Bernard
Getajobtips.com
OPEN to connect  

And finally, I’d consider joining more groups and tracking which ones brings better results. Also participate in other group discussions so as not to tick off the group manager and to get to be known in the group discussion as a thought leader. Thanks, Kathy

All great strategies!  Thanks everyone!