This list includes 10 killer books about blog marketing written by some really smart folks like Darren Rowse, Chris Garrett and David Meerman Scott to name a few. These guys are experts in their fields & can definitely help you accelerate your learning if your new to the blogosphere & looking for some solid reference pieces.

Here’s my selection of the top 3 blog marketing books that I think every blogger should read from the list:

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
by Darren Rowse & Chris Garrett

A complete how-to from two of the world’s top bloggers

Thousands of aspiring bloggers launch new blogs every day, hoping to boost their income. Without solid advice from experts, most will fail. This best selling guide, now fully revised with new and updated tips and tricks from two of the world’s most successful bloggers, provides the step-by-step information bloggers need to turn their hobby into an income source or a full time career.

• Earning a solid income from blogging is possible, but tricky; this book details proven techniques and gives aspiring bloggers the tools to succeed
• Even novices will learn to choose a blog topic, analyse the market, set up a blog, promote it, and earn revenue
• Offers solid, step-by-step instruction on how bloggers make money, why niches matter, how to use essential blogging tools and take advantage of social media and content aggregators, what a successful blog post should include, how to optimise advertising, and much more

Written by two full time professional bloggers, the updated edition of ProBlogger tells you exactly how to launch and maintain a blog that makes money.

via Amazon

Blog Marketing: The Revolutionary New Way to Increase Sales, Build Your Brand, and Get Exceptional Results
by Jeremy Wright

Revolutionize your business with the power of the blog

Today, tens of millions of bloggers are communicating on the Internet about companies, products, trends, and much more. Don’t miss out on the conversation! Blog Marketing explains how blogs are amazingly cost-effective tools for making business decisions based on actual customer feedback and market intelligence. So get on the blog wagon!

Find out how…

• GM runs new concepts by customers and invites feedback on their popular FastLane blog–one of today’s top 500 blogs
• The Disney Channel uses blogs to streamline internal communication and increase their engineering team’s efficiency
• Microsoft product development teams look for blog feedback before making significant changes to applications
• Boeing used blogs to gather customer feedback while developing the new 787 Dreamliner

“I can offer you no greater advice than to read and study this book as if your corporate life depends upon it. Because it does.” — From the foreword by Dave Taylor, publisher, The Intuitive Life Business Blog

via Amazon

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly, 2nd Edition
by Dave Meerman Scott

A completely revised and updated edition of the BusinessWeek bestseller on effective, modern marketing and PR best practices

The New Rules of Marketing and PR shows you how to leverage the potential that Web-based communication offers your business. Finally, you can speak directly to customers and buyers, establishing a personal link with the people who make your business work.

This new second edition paperback keeps you up-to-date on the latest trends.

• New case studies and current examples are included to illustrate the very latest in marketing and PR trends.
• Completely updated to reflect the latest marketing and PR techniques using social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube
• Includes a step-by-step action plan for harnessing the power of the Internet to communicate directly with buyers, increase sales, and raise online visibility
• David Meerman Scott is a renowned online marketing strategist, keynote speaker and the author of World Wide Rave, from Wiley

The New Rules of Marketing and PR, Second Edition gives you all the information you need to craft powerful and effective marketing messages and get them to the right people at the right moment-at a fraction of the price of a traditional marketing campaign.

via Amazon

All of these as well as the other 7 listed in the original post are available from Amazon in a wide variety of formats, read, learn & enjoy.

Whether you blog for busines or pleasure, you’ll benefit from these rather simple ways to boost your blog traffic with SlideShare.

Upload top blog posts to SlideShare.

• You can copy/paste your post into a document and upload it to SlideShare.
• You’ll get great exposure on SlideShare.
• Remember to link to your blog at the end.

Fill out your Profile.

• Our profile pages are often the most overlooked section on our site.
• Give people a reason to connect with you on SlideShare.

Be Social.

• Favorite and comment on other presentations.
• You’ll connect with smart authors, thought leaders and other interesting people.

Blog about other people’s presentations.

• You sound boring if you only talk about yourself.
• Blog about someone else’s presentation or document and be sure to tell the author.
• He or she might just reciprocate.

In hindsight thought, these are really simple tips and I am totally kicking myself for missing such a sitter. It’s original content, it’s social content and if it’s good content, it’s going to be enjoyed andd shared and generate additional traffic to your website quite nicely.

Please feel free to comment, share or let me know if you have any other cool tips like this that you would like to share.

via SlideShare.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Blogging Traffic Tips

10. Write at least five major "pillar" articles.

A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something.

Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good "how-to" lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum.

Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post.

The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed. You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name.

If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog.

In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs.

Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog. Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts.

A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry.

What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments. This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog.

One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival.

A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic.

The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers. To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com.

To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort.

Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com.

This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles.

Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter. How you benefit is through what is called your "Resource Box". You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles.

Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

About the Author

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind Program please visit www.BlogMastermind.com