What are the best sites to join in order to drive traffic to my blog?

I think it is important to have a presence in the blogospere. Here are some ideas. It’s getting a little long in the tooth, but much of it is still sound.

@Marina – thank you very much. It is indeed sound advice. I just setup my feed on Yahoo! :-)

To drive traffic to your blog, I highly recommend going to similar blogs and posting insightful comments. Have a link to your blog in your profile on that site, don’t put your link in the comment itself, that’s spam. If you write insightful comments, people will come to your blog and read your own posts. It’s a great way to develop loyal followers.

I’m a broken record on this one, but www.chrisbrogan.com

Just discover Chrisbrogan and love his site!

For me the hardest part is finding time to do the necessary traffic building steps.

I have to say that commenting on other blogs is a good way to get real, returning traffic and of course good content!

I use Entrecard, MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog but I find Entrecard to fit my busy schedule. You earn credits and use them to buy ads on other blogs. You can earn credits by actively dropping your Entrecard on other blogs. You can earn credits passively by accepting ads on your blog.

Think of maybe joining a site like tradedoubler as you can get get other sites to link to you in exchange for commision or a fee for clicks. The bonus is your google ranking will go up from these sites linking to you, you can pick and choose which sites you want linking to you and you get a good google boost from just being registered on the high-traffic Tradedouble website. There is also Commision junction that does the same.

Obviously, having good content and a nice design will be your first point of call as that will keep people coming back and get you natural traffic from word of mouth referrals and content coming up on search engines.