As a writer, your blog topics should be on the topics you write about.  using RSS feeds means that each time you publish a new post, your feed will broadcast that around the Web, alerting smart editors and publishers – and readers! – that your blog is a hotbed of content. Plus, you start looking more authoritative too!

Getting your blog contents broadcast everywhere is accomplished when you post your RSS feed, or your posts are subscribed to by other sites and blogs too.  For example, you can add your feed to any other blogs or websites you also currently own. Have your site posts show up in the sidebar of your blog, and visitors to your other sites will find your site too.

You can ask your online friends to do the same with their blogs or sites, by adding your RSS feed to their pages as well. Most blog platforms offer a widget or plugin to allow an RSS feed to display in the blog layout.

Start building additional sites and blogs on your favorite topics, and have your RSS display on those too. Related topics are perfect for driving additional traffic to your site.

Use online feed aggregators to list your RSS feed with directories of feeds. Some good ones are FeedAgg, for example, you simply add your feed’s URL to their database. Some others are FriendFeed, and xFruits. Send your RSS fed out there far and wide, and you’ll see more traffic coming into your site.

- Write a TON of articles! Posting to article directories, with links in the author area, are one excellent free way.

- Trade links with sites that complement yours. Search for Hubs or sites that you can trade with. You can search within Hub Pages, or use Google to search, or search for blogs using Google Blog Search. Email the site owner to ask about a possible trade.

- Use RSS feeds from your blog to distribute your feeds – and links – across the Web.

These are all ways to get free backlinks – but you also want to realize that “free” means no money – but they will take time to build.

There is a new site which shows how to get backlinks at a very low price. Connect Content helps you connect with other website owners to trade links. You post your desired linking keyword, and in exchange, you link to other folks’ requested anchor links. The service is just $12 a month, which is probably the most affordable out there, after free! You can check it out at ConnectContent.com.

It really is about taking the time to build quality content, then getting links to your site, and publicizing your site around the Web in a variety of ways.

You might ask: what is the best way to get traffic to your site? The best way is to get targeted traffic – visitors who are looking for exactly what you are writing about. Often, this is the reason that social bookmarking is not the most highly desirable method of getting traffic. It’s been shown that social site traffic is mostly “surfers” who are interested but may or may not be the precise audience you are writing for. If you’re monetizing your site or your blog, social traffic is the least likely to earn you income, for that reason.

How can you get targeted traffic from the Web? You need to get good rankings in Google, Yahoo or MSN search engines for your topic, attracting people who are searching for the info you provide.

One of the best ways to do that is to use article marketing. You write multiple articles describing information from your site, then post those around the Web, so that the search engines pick them up and point visitors to your main site or site. Each article contains links to your site, giving you multiple backlinks and quality content that leads visitors to your page.

Article writing and posting, especially if you’re trying to post to many different article directories, can be tiring. A few different services are available now to help make the task easier.

Using article marketing helps in a number of ways: You get keyword anchored backlinks to yoru site, which help your rankings in the search engines; you get more authority for having top content posted in a variety of places on the Web; and the articles themselves start giving you additional impact by getting listed in the search engines as well as pointing to your site. These are just a few of the ways article marketing can help grow traffic to your site.

It also beats advertising, which can be extremely costly, and where testing alone can blow through your budget. You can buy links from a variety of services, but this is also expensive, and can hurt you in the long run. You also don’t want to try using “black hat” methods, which can get you banned from Google for good.

Using article marketing to promote your site is still 100% legit with all search engines, keeps working for you even while you sleep, and is really inexpensive. It can also help your site get indexed quickly, which means traffic finds your page right away.

If you can write quality sites, you can write good articles to post online, and drive traffic to your site – quality, relevant traffic, that can help build your presence online.

So – here’s the video of the reviews of three sites I selected from a few dozen submitted by readers.  I noticed a few themes that ran through nearly all sites I saw: writers are too busy writing to learn about basic SEO-friendly site design, and are taking baby steps when it comes to social networking and Web 2.0.  Yet these are seriously important lessons to learn if you want to bring readers right to your virtual doorstep.

Without considering basic Web design issues, your site comes off like an old-fashioned brochure or resume website. Plus, you want your site positioned and designed to keep visitors engaged once you start using all that traffic generation to bring them there!  (That is, you want them to stay and READ, right? You are a writer right?!

So, with this review I’m providing a starting point for writers to consider when they build or tweak a site.  Warning:  this may be too basic for some writers who are already well-versed in online promotion, but judging by those who sent me sites to take a look at, many more know they need to do something, they just aren’t sure exactly what. Hopefully this will give everyone some ideas.

After your take a look at the video walk-through of my three winners’ sites right here.  then we can have a good long discussion of how writers can use (1) and (2) to build income.   

What would you do to enhance these sites?

The selection criteria was simple: I was looking for sites that were writing-related, i.e., sites built by writers to promote their writing, whether fiction, nonfiction, freelance, or ghostwriting, and sites that had some basics in place, with potential to build upon (in my subjective determination!). Out of a few dozen submissions, I’ve chosen these three sites:

Two of the site owners have published books, two are freelance writers, and each site is in a slightly different stage of development and design.

I’ll be uploading video of each site at least twice: Once when I show you what to look for when assessing your site’s design elements, and next, when I describe the steps these site owners have taken to implement changes to enhance their results in terms of traffic and hopefully revenue generation.

I think as a reader of this blog you can benefit from these reviews regardless of the type of site you have, since many of these techniques are well-known and used by all kinds of online businesses and freelancers.

Take a look at these sites to see what you would do to enhance them, and if you have (constructive!) suggestions for these writers, post them here.