Recently I had a client ask me for some tips at building a good blog. I thought I'd humbly pass them on, as she found them pretty helpful.

First off, very few people actually follow blogs religiously. While there are functions to subscribe to blogs, there are only a very few blogs that are visited on a regular basis, and they tend to revolve around pop culture (say TMZ or Perez Hilton's blogs). Particularly as you start out, it is not feasible to expect that people will find your blog and then continue to come back to read more. More and more, people are simply subscribing to bloggers' Twitter feeds, and just sampling the posts that interest them the most.

So, where do most blog hits come from initially? For us, there are three main sources - search hits, social network referrals, and self referrals.

Search hits come from people finding blog posts through Google. If you blog about topics that people are frequently searching for then your posts will be found by those searchers. For example, we blogged about Lululemon's Olympic clothing line (that VANOC pooh-poohed) and to date we've had over 300 hits to it; of those over 100 came from web searches.

Your social network can be a big source of blog traffic. When we write a blog we immediately post it on Facebook, Linked-in, and Twitter. This way people who follow us through those sites are instantly informed every time we add new content. Plus, we're always promoting the blog in our email signature, and there's a link to all our social media sites on every page of our website. This comprehensive social media strategy hits multiple people every time we create content, and works together to create fans of our brand.

Self referrals are simply hits to the blog from people that land on our home page. They see that Studiothink has a blog, and then they go check it out. They might not specifically be interested in our content, they're probably just curious as to what we blog about.

At this point you might ask "why even bother blogging if it's so much work to get traffic?" The truth is that even if your blog doesn't get a lot of hits, it does build an aura of expertise around you. When people visit your site, they see the blog and they see the quality of your content, and it adds to your reputation as an expert in the field. So, even if the blog isn't getting a ton of hits, it will still help people feel more comfortable choosing your firm.