Building a Powerhouse Blog Audience

How do you lure those eyeballs to your blog? How do you know if you are getting the “bums in seats”? Are you monitoring your traffic? Do you make use of the analytical tools that are out there and for the most part are free and easy to use?
The two key challenges to blogging are:
1) Quieting the voices in your head and blogging (where have we heard that before??) 
2) Marketing your blog. Marketing is something we are bombarded with daily, however, do you know how to do this for your blog?
The entire reason to blog is to engage with people, no matter the topic. You have something to say to express yourself and/or build your business. Your online engagement should include online networking. Building relationships. You simply cannot have the only engagement with people and potential customers be “hey take a look at my latest blog post!”. People will eventual just ignore you.
There are practical ways of building an audience. Use social media. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like are where people are spending their time. Build a core of friends (your audience) using these platforms. Most importantly, be genuine when engaging. Connect and ‘friend’ people who share common interests with you. Comment on their social media comments and blog posts. Once you have built up a rapport, you can approach this audience with links or teasers to your blog posts as you post them.
Using social media can be the bulk of how you market your blog. Analysis and monitoring are the final components to marketing your blog. You can learn what is working for you and what people are most responding to if you use the tools to monitor traffic and track hits to links you send out.