By far, blogs are one of the easiest website models to generate traffic to. With established blog based communities, you are able to maximize your outreach and expose your website to hungry crowds of targeted buyers.

Two of these communities are www.blogCatalog.com and www.MyBlogLog.com

With MyBlogLog, you can add a widget to your blog that will display your recent visitors and in exchange, every blog you visit will also feature your avatar with a link to your blog profile. It's a great way to generate traffic to your website while exploring relevant blogs in your niche.

Here are a few other techniques to driving consistent traffic to your new blogs:

1) Keep Your Content Fresh

If you want to retain visitors and encourage repeat visits, you need to ensure that your blogs are consistently updated with fresh, relevant content. Try to avoid using PLR (Private Label Rights) material and instead, offer your visitors with original, high quality content that is focused on your overall blog theme. If you need to outsource your content, consider hiring an affordable writer from sites like www.Elance.com or www.Guru.com

2) Ping And Ping Some More
Each time you update your blog, make sure that you ping it to notify blog directories that your website has fresh content. You can use services like www.Pingomatic.com to notify multiple services at once. You can also use plugins that will automatically ping your website each time you post new material.

3) Submit articles to blog carnivals and directories with a link back to your blogs main page. Sites like www.blogCarnival.com allow you to post content in specific categories relevant to your niche.

For additional traffic generation strategies, and to find out how you can start generating a full time income from your blog, check out www.Your-URL.com for a detailed, step by step guide to killer traffic generation and monetization tactics.

If you want to optimize your blog for search engine rankings and maximize your traffic and interaction with your visitors, you should take advantage of some of the most useful Wordpress plugins available online.

Here are the top five that I integrate into every blog I create:

1) CodeBanter's Autoresponder Plugin

Available for free at www.CodeBanter.com, you can instantly add an opt-in box to your Wordpress blog, enabling your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. If you want to make the most money possible online, you need to focus on growing an active targeted list of subscribers. Consider giving your visitors a free report in exchange for their subscription.

2) Spam Elimination

As a blogger, you are likely going to receive a lot of comment spam, which is left for you by spam robots, scripts and even people deliberately leaving comments with no other motive than to spam their website links throughout your blogs pages. You can eliminate this by integrating the free spam management plugin available at: akismet.com/

3) Google XML Sitemaps Generator - creates a sitemap of all articles on your WordPress blog. Helps Google and other search engines index every article you write. Available at: www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

4) All in One SEO Pack - Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization). Download from: wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

5) Related Posts - Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. Increase pageviews by providing targeted related content. Available from: wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries

Other Useful Plugins:

6) Share This - lets your visitors to add your post to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail to a friend. Available at: sharethis.com/publisher?type=wpplugin

7) Twitter Updater - automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post. Download from: blog.victoriac.net/blog/twitter-updater

WordPress Database Backup - On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Back up your blog today. Download: www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup

Once you have your plugins uploaded and activated, it's time to start making money with your online blog.