For many publishers on the Internet such as bloggers, finding a great source of traffic can be difficult. Commonly people turn to search engines for traffic. The funny thing about search engines is that a lot of people assume that it’s difficult to get traffic from search engines. While that isn’t really true, there are also many other sources where you can score traffic.

Ranking well in the search engines isn’t really all that complicated. However, one thing remains true about search engine traffic, and that is the fact that it can take time to build up your rankings and number of listings in the search engines. Unless you’re doing something crazy like some kind of huge viral search engine marketing blitz, natural organic ranking can take months to establish where it would be something to be considered as a viable source of traffic to your blog.

So really the question remains, “where can you get traffic from?” something that is quick and instant and can come in a burst fire? Well, here are my thoughts on that. For whatever your blog topic, there is more likely a social network that matches it. If you enjoy using your blog to write about Celebrity news and gossip, consequently there is a Digg style social network called www.showhype.com. If you are a real estate blogger you might consider checking out www.activerain.com.

All in all, social bookmarking and networking sites are a great source for traffic. The problem most people have with Social networking sites is the fact that they are simply using the wrong ones to submit their content into. Now don’t get me wrong, I am all about scoring search engine traffic. But many people feel like its near impossible to get traffic from search engines. Many people end up getting frustrated with their rankings, irritated at Google’s rules, etc… while it very well might be easier to just spend a few hours researching different social networks.

There is a WordPress plugin that I use on many of my blogs called Sociable:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/

If you download and install this plugin you’ll be presented with around 100 different social networking sites that you can plugin to the bottom of your post pages on your blog. While I wouldn’t recommend checking all 100, what I would recommend doing is using this plugin to easily click the links of these 100 different networking sites to see what each site’s primarily topic is about.

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The above is a screen shot of the Socialable plugin being used on my blog titled, The Coupon Saver. What I have done is basically hand picked the different social networks that I feel will work best for the content that is being published on that blog.

Some social networks are only geared towards a certain topic. www.sphinn.com for example is a social network that deals primarily around search engine optimization. It wouldn’t benefit me to submit content from The Coupon Saver into to Sphinn. Not only would it be a waste of time for both myself and the Sphinn community, it would also look bad on my online reputation. Instead, I have chosen places like Sales Marks and Blue Dot to submit the content into.

People kind of fear being defendant on search engines. I can understand this as I too get a little nervous being so Dependant upon one source of traffic. The good news is that there are many fishing ponds that are packed full fish. You just need to invest some time into researching and discovering which ponds have the fish you like to catch. So, all in all, my suggestions for you is to simply spend some time checking out many of the available social networks and choose about 5 to 10 that you feel will work best for your blog.

When you do that, then work on establishing yourself in that community, makes friends and just roll with the flow. For further advice on how to interact in social networking, I would suggest that you read my post titled, Successful Marketing and Promoting in Social Networking Sites. The truth of the matter is this, there are many places that have traffic. While the volume might be lower that what you can potentially get from Google if you land a superior ranking for a keyword phrase, overall you’re going to achieve that “Burst Factor” that you desire for your blog.

Some folks say burst traffic is bad, because it doesn’t convert well into regular reader traffic. My advice to you would be to simply prepare your blog for the predicated burst traffic. If you plan on submitting a post into StumbleUpon, Digg, etc… plan ahead and and modify your blog design to showcase whatever it is that is important to you. That may be your opt in mailing list, Google AdSense Code or a new product your promoting in ClickBank.

Overall, you have to have a purpose in mind. You can’t just say that you want to get traffic to your blog and be done with it. You need to have a reason why you want the traffic. If your only desire is to get comments on a post, then be sure to word your article in a way that encourages readers to comment. If you’re trying to get click on your Google AdSense ads, make sure you do a great job with blending and stying in your AdSense code into your posts. For whatever the reason may be as to why you want traffic. Keep in mind, there is plenty of it… you just need to find the right fishing hole and secondly, be sure to have a purpose in place for the burst of traffic you get.