Building Traffic? How do I do it?

One of the hardest things to learn concretely as a new blog writer is how to build traffic. Blogger and Wordpress both have their advantages. But Blogger makes it increasingly easy to use amazon affiliation and Google adsense. So there is so little work left to do but build the blog to an appearance of your liking and then write on your hearts passions. You are told from the start that MOST blogs don't make money and that writing should be done because you enjoy it. But if no-one ever reads it what's the point right?

Then there is the point that comes after you've been doing this for years and you only see traffic from a few friends and relatives and some random foreign tracking machines that you wonder is there anything else? What's next? Can this be more?

So you wonder what I am wondering now. How do I build a steady stream of traffic both from repeat visits and new visitors? How do I top the Google Hit List when someone looks up my subject? How do I get someone to click on those ads so I can make some money? That's what I want to know so I'm starting my research. I found the below articles that I don't have time to read. But I'll look into them and then see if there are any common threads that I can summarize.


Articles on Building Traffic:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tactics-to-increase-blog-traffic

http://weblogs.about.com/od/bloggingtips/tp/TipsIncreaseBlogTraffic.htm

http://techgyo.com/index.php/networking-to-increase-blog-traffic/

http://www.stevescottsite.com/how-to-increase-blog-traffic

Darrell G. Wolfe