Starting a blog can be quite overwhelming. In fact, many bloggers throw in the towel during their first month. Why? Well because they don’t see results.

Most people who start blogs don’t really know what they’re doing and due to hyped up bullshit floating around the web – they expect intstant results.

They expect to start seeing traffic, subscribers and sales pour in as soon as they publish their first blog post.

The truth is you can start getting immediate traffic, but only if you’ve properly optimized your blog both on and off-page. If you want fast rankings and traffic; here are a few “unusual” SEO strategies:

1. Forum Marketing

If you want your blog to be a real success, you need to focus on more than SEO. You need to focus on establishing yourself in the community. One of the best ways of establishing yourself is by participating in relevant forums. If you’re in the Internet Marketing or Network Marketing niche, the Warrior Forum or Better Networker are both great places to start. How do you benefit?

First, you can build links to your blog using your forum signature. Your forum signature gets displayed below every forum post or reply you publish and you’re allowed to use the anchor text you please. While forum signature links are low quality, they definitely boost and help sustain search engine rankings long term.

On top of the links, every other forum member who sees one of your posts will also see your blog so it’s great for gaining new visitors, credibility and exposure.

2. Social Signals

A year ago you could actually argue the statement that social signals are important. Now – it’s a fact. You can actually rank websites for competitive keywords using social signals alone. By social signals I mean Google +1′s, Facebook likes, Tweets and bookmarks from sites like Digg & Stumbleupon.

Getting social signals can be difficult. The first thing you can do is encourage readers to share your posts. You can also use Ping.fm, but that won’t get you very far. If you really want to make use of social signals and get rapid search engine rankings, consider using SYNND. SYNND is a service that will promote your blog content with social signals.

It allows you to build internal social signals on total autopilot. SYNND will build hundreds or even thousands of bookmarks, G+1′s, facebook likes, tweets and re-tweets to the sites or pages of your choice. There is a monthly membership fee and it can get quite expensive, but it’s totally worth it. Click here to check it out.

3. Reverse Engineer Competitors

If you want to destroy your competitors, you need to reverse engineer their link profiles. By link profiles I mean backlinks. Using a tool like Backlink Watch you can pull up a list of all your competitor’s backlinks. You will need to do this one by one, so it will take a while.

The best thing to do is to pick a keyword you really want to rank for that your main competitors are already ranking for. Then take the URL’s of your competitors pages that are ranking and plop them into Backlink Watch. Backlink Watch will then generate the list of all the backlinks poiting to the page/s.

The first thing you can try and do is obtain links from the exact pages your competitors are getting links from. Getting the exact links is difficult, what I try and do is get their high Page Rank links. Backlink analysis tools will tell you the exact Page Rank of your competitor’s backlinks.

So you can checkout the high PR ones and try and obtain links from them. After you’ve attempted to obtain their exact high PR links, you can mimmick their link building strategy by building the same KIND of links. (i.e. forum profiles, blog comments, web2.0 links, article directories)

Just 3 simple SEO strategies that work.

In Prosperity,

David Wood

P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more cool SEO tips, tricks and secrets.