The best way I’ve found to encourage participation is to get out there and comment on blogs in the same niche or on blogs where you connect with the author. Some will come by and join in, others may not, but it’s a start.

The growth of this blog was extremely slow. I just took it one day at a time, got out there, and built my community one comment at a time.

Hang in there! Happy Blogging!

I have great content, and I update daily. I’ve only been actively blogging for a month, and so far, I’ve had over 5,000 viewers. But they come, read, and leave! LOL!
Check out TheBigBlackNewsBLog´s awesome post: Caster Semenya Gets A Make-Over; Tries To Prove She is All Woman

However, I do completely agree with you on blog commenting as a way to increase visitors.

I wrote a similar post a few days ago: http://www.brenthodgson.com/internet-marketing/increasing-blog-visitor-traffic.php

I’d be interested to get your thoughts if you wanted to come by for a look.

Brent

Brent Hodgson’s last blog post..Traffic as an SEO Factor

Asako and I had a discussion about RSS feeds awhile ago…we were both subscribing to them, but our in boxes got so full, we couldn’t keep up. That is one disadvantage of subscribing, but other than that, they are a great way to stay current with your favorite blogs.

Keywords can be tough. If you use them too much, your writing gets distorted, but if you don’t use them to some degree, your posts may get buried in cyberspace. As much as we “write for our audience”, and not for search engines, in order for a blog to be “found”, it’s almost imperative that we resort to some degree of keyword usage.

Try reading my post titled: How-to-use-keywords-or-keyword-phrases, and see if that helps at all. It’s based on what I have gathered from my research.

I really struggle with the keyword thing though. I used particular keywords throughout my posts in the early days and really struggled to make them sound natural. Is there some knack to this, or an easier way of doing it?