If you’re fairly new to blogging, it can sometimes feel like you’re not getting anywhere with your blog.  You’ve got very little traffic, almost zero interaction, and not much hope it will get any better any time soon.

I started my latest blog roughly around October/November of 2009. (I think!) So around about six months ago.  Today it’s currently a PR 3, with an Alexa ranking of 478,175 and climbing.  In the last six months I’ve had roughly 22,165 visits and 57,129 page views.

Now that is fairly modest in comparison to many more established blogs, but I’m pretty proud of the traction I’ve gained so far and am excited about its continued growth.   And I feel there are a handful of simple things I did that really helped to propel that growth fairly quickly.

I’ve been guest blogging as long as I’ve been blogging: for about 3 years now. All my self-branding achievements as well as all my most notable career ups would not have been possible without guest posting.

Throughout my guest blogging career, I have been wondering if that would be a smart idea to attempt to create such a place where guest bloggers might get connected to the blog owners who look for good free content for their sites.

In the end, I thought that would be a a useful tool actually because such a service would be a place where everyone wins and quality plays a decisive role: guest bloggers get links and exposure, blog owners get free content (which means extra traffic, more search referrals, more social media shares, etc) and poor quality posts get rejected.