There are two major ways to get traffic to your blog:

Pay Per Click (PPC):
Pay Per Click is advertising provided by the search engine providers (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are the big 3) where you pay for top placement. Their strategies for placement differ slightly. Some search engines will give you higher placement if your ad has a higher click-through rate (meaning more people click on your ad in ratio to the amount of times your ad was shown), others give top positions to the highest bidder.

In either case, you’ll have to pay. It is a quick way to get listed (albeit not in the organic listings) in the search engines and a smart way to get your traffic flowing – but it is not the cheapest AND you could spend far more than is profitable for your business if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Resources to check out:
Google AdWords
Yahoo Search Marketing
MSN AdCenter

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
There are a lot of companies working ‘behind the scenes’ to help website owners get plenty of traffic from the natural search engine listings. Natural listings mean the search engine has ranked you according to the value it believes your site will offer an individual searching for a specific word or phrase. The nice thing about SEO is that it’s free (meaning you don’t have to pay to get the traffic). The downside is that getting your site listed on the first page of search results can take a long time and lots of work!

Resources:
Search Engine Relationship chart - who’s serving who?

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