Great list of visitor building tips! 
 
A seventh tip I would add is: include an emotional angle. 
 
People are more likely to share emotional experiences. (both positive and negative) 
 
If you can include an emotional angle in your blog post, especially if the post includes helpful information, the post is more likely to be shared.

These tips are spot on. I would add "post regularly" so your community gets used to seeing your updates, and you can cover more topics of interest. If you only post every 3 months, it probably won't help your marketing efforts very much.

Great article. Amazing how many BAD blogs are out there and how great blogs all share the traits you describe.

Thanks for such a great post Diana!  
 
I would add to this (for service business related blogs) to make your content actionable. If you're giving advice on a particular subject, make it easy for the reader to implement your suggestions by outlining the action steps.  
 
I've found that this encourages visitors to stop by regularly, because they appreciate your generosity and view the blog owner as an expert resource who can help them with common challenges. 
 
Sydni Craig-Hart 
The Smart Simple Marketing Coach 
www.smartsimplemarketing.com/blog

I've definitely noticed that with social media #1 makes a big difference. It is interesting to test out which titles get the most clicks. And #3 is crucial for long term traffic.

Good stuff Diana. You've hit some essentials here but I'm going to mention another that you demonstrated with this blog as well: Brevity. 
 
One of the mistakes that businesses often make when they first start blogging is that of writing long-winded articles. Although this may sound nice because it means lots of info, readers will actually read these types of articles less (at least the majority) because they have 20 other emails they already need to open or there are 15 other articles currently in their feed reader. 
 
In other words, blogs need to be to the point. More than 800 words or so can scare off a lot of people, so if it's possible to keep the message but cut the article size, more people will read it and ultimately more results will be had.

Such great tips. I follow them all (or try to) but not all in one post. I think I'll try for tomorrow to hit every single tip.

The two best ways I've found to get traffic to my blog: 
 
 
 
1) Writing articles on ezines -- I get about half of my total traffic from the articles I've written. 
 
 
 
2) Leaving comments on other people's blogs -- by leaving comments on other blogs with similar content, you'll not only get links that the search engines will use to raise your search engine position, but you'll get direct traffic from those other blogs, AND you'll develop relationships with those blog owners . . . the blog owners will be visiting your site and trading ideas as well. 
 
 
 
3) And, finally, before ever writing an article, or leaving comments on a blog, know what keywords are the biggest opportunity. Not a keyword that produces 1,000 searches a month, but one that produces 10's of thousands a month. Your traffic will SKYROCKET.

I love the way the first part says write headlines like this, but don't be clever, but do be unique. The science that is social media is sad sometimes. I'm glad UnMarketing exists.

very good tips, thanks! I would like to add one which has worked well for me. Quote, feature or interview relevant twitter users or bloggers within your content. They will always then push it to their audience and the knock on effect can be great. Examples here, www.thegrowthacademy.com/blog. Keep them relevant though!

This is really good stuff Diana. I agree with Marcus that brevity is very important. There are only a few wordy blogs I'll read. Tim Ferriss's being one of them. 
 
 
 
A way to encourage more readership is to do a highly interesting topic over 3 or 4 posts hopefully building the anticipation. I'll definitely pass this along.

Thanks for the tips! Any thoughts on how to get readers to return for more after you enticed them once? How can we encourage readers to subscribe?

Funny is good. Appropriate humor will engage readers. If they LOL they will come back.

Thanks for the great post. I want to ask what the difference between using

tags versus bold texts is in SEO perspective. Does search engine read

tags better than it does to bold texts?

I always interact with others, the only problem is sometimes some are not really interacting in my blog. I use twitter mostly for interacting.

how about adding the Update Services in wordpress writing settings?

Good stuff here. One tip I would include is to make sure to optimize everything for the search engines. People often don't realize that images need to be optimized for your relevant keywords also.

This is great stuff! I'm always looking for little tweaks that I can do to make my site better since I'm relatively new to blogging. I signed up for e-zine articles but haven't submitted anything yet. I didn't realize how much traffic you could get from that! I'm going to get right on that, thanks!

There are some great tips here, and thanks for those. My ten pennyworth, is that sometimes a (short) video can be a great way to illustrate your point and can break up the 'reading' bit. There is so much information for us to read/absorb that something that's a little different can really help. 
Caroline J

I am glad I ran into this post following the last Jeffbullas post, as I you provide very valuable tips. 
Especially point 2 is too often ignored by bloggers, I think valuable content is nothing if you don't provide a meaningful way to read it, making it easy for your readers and appealing enough for them to be willing to share it with their peers.