After a few years of writing as a gaming journalist at a variety of sites big and small, I've started up my own blog to accompany a monthly column I write for a fiction magazine.

The blog can be located here: newenggamer.wordpress.com

I know how to write relatively well but, honestly I've never dealt with the whole business of drumming up traffic before. Essentially, I have no clue how to manage this thing.

I'm not looking to get rich, or become the biggest site on the web or anything, but I would like to establish at least a moderate, regular audience. I was wonderig if you guys had any tips to help get me started.

One big tip I would give is to buy a .com domain, or get one through the Wordpress shop. It will help your site expand almost instantly.

Getting traffic is not only about getting people to visit your blog, it's also about how to turn them into regular visitors. I see you are already getting some comment activity on the articles you have written, that's a good start. When people are first visiting your site, they will notice this activity and value the site higher than compared to a blog with dated articles that people have not responded to.

I suggest you get a Google Analytics account (it's free), it will enable you to get a deeper insight in your visitors, how many are returning, what pages they visit most, what pages they are exiting your site from, etc. I don't know if you can integrate Google Analytics in a wordpress hosted blog, but if you are really serious about your blog you are going to need your own hosted webspace and a proper domain name some day. It doesn't really have to be a .com domain, but something other than myblog.wordpress.com looks way more professional. Your own domain also has the additional bonus of being way more SEO friendly (read: you're more likely to show up in search results).

For a personal blog, you can use your personal Facebook and Twitter account to tell your friends about new articles. Maybe some of your friends will not be into gaming, but that doesn't really matter. They will know writing about games is one of your passions and will not be offended by a few tweets or facebook updates about your passion. If you don't have a Twitter account, I would strongly recommend you to create one and put it on your blog. If people stumble upon an article and they like it, they are likely to follow you on Twitter and be informed on new updates.

On that same note, websites which allow you to publish your own work to appeal to a wider audience are highly useful in grabbing those extra visitors. N4G is one of them, although they have sort of turned into the filth of the industry within a matter of months :/

Other than Gameleon, does anyone know places to promote our features, reviews, and other articles? The more exposure the better ;)

I wouldn't dare go anywhere near N4G. Trying to lecture intelligent articles to them is like trying to teach a giraffe not to be tall.

It's pretty horrendous. A few years ago it was tolerable, but now it has become flooded with opinion pieces written by people who should be the same distance from a pen as you are from N4G :) I've submitted "intelligent articles", but they are normally ignored and sunken under a layer of garbage the size of a landfill.

Hence my excitement to see Gameleon added a similar feature... hopefully this one will work out better, given the audience and all.

Gameleon looks to unite actual writers and readers rather than people who just read an article title and make an opinion of that without actually reading it.

The new "Post Your Work" feature has not primarily been created to drive more traffic to your articles. It has been created to allow you to link your work to your Gameleon.net profile - as a concise journalist portfolio.  Other writers and games industry professionals can have a quick look at your work and see how it's been appreciated by other writers and game professionals. 

Cool, sounds like sort of a combination of LinkedIn + Facebook (business prospects + 'look at me' effect). Anyway, great work.

Back to the original topic: After getting an appropriate .net/.com/.whatever domain name, make sure you read up on SEO and SEF practices. One of the best things you can do (and this gets easier as you accumulate more content) is to figure out ways to link to previously posted articles in your newest feature. For example, if you wrote about "Game XYZ" a week ago, a review on "Game XYZ" a month ago, and are currently writing your thoughts about the newest patch for "Game XYZ", figure out how to link the review and other notes to the newest one. Page views per visit are a great way to determine what interests your users.

You can figure out the page views / user by installing Google Analytics, which was already mentioned above.

How much does .com domain cost? I'd be happy to invest in one, but the misses and literally just moved into our first apartment and the new bombardment of bills is hammering us a tad. If it's too much, I may just have to work in the confines of Wordpress for now.