Last week, I spoke at the Catalyst Conference in Irvine, California on the topic of my new book, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World (Thomas Nelson, May 22). As part of my introduction, I shared how my audience has grown since I started blogging in April of 2004.

Note that these numbers reflect my average monthly unique visitors. I simply took the total number of unique visitors for the year and divided by twelve months (or in the case of 2004, eight months). With the exception of the first few years, this data came from my Google Analytics account.

Welcome to my new podcast, This Is Your Life. Like my blog, it is dedicated to the theme of intentional leadership. My goal is to help you live with more passion, work with greater focus, and lead with extraordinary influence.

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I plan to talk about the same topics I discuss here on my blog, namely:

Whenever I speak on the topic of platform-building, someone always asks, “How can I generate more traffic for my blog?” Most are hoping I have a silver bullet, something that will instantly get them the recognition they deserve.

The bad news is that it’s not quite that simple. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is a platform. It takes doing several things right—and doing them over a long period of time.

Although I’ve been blogging since 2005, I still feel like a newbie, sometimes. For years, I’ve wondered, “Why is nobody reading what I’m writing?” Maybe you’ve asked the same question.

I’m beginning to discover the answer. It has to do with community.

In the last 30 days, I have seen my blog traffic jump by 81.3%. I have seen steady growth since I converted from TypePad to self-hosted WordPress two years ago (up 338.6%). But the last 30 days represented the largest single jump in my traffic ever.

I want to share why I believe this has happened, so that you can apply what I have learned to your own blog. Hopefully, you will experience similar results.

I have numerous friends who are attempting to become more serious about their blogging this next year. They aren’t necessarily wanting to become professional bloggers, but they would like to increase their traffic and, perhaps, make money from their site.

If you are in this camp, then there are three bloggers you must follow. I subscribe to their blogs via RSS and read every article they post.

Assuming you want to increase your blog traffic, there are certain mistakes you must avoid to be successful. If you commit these mistakes, your traffic will never gain momentum. Worse, it may plateau or begin to decrease.

How do I know? After writing more than 1,000 posts and receiving more than 60,000 comments, I have made most of the mistakes you can make—numerous times. As a result, I have begun to see certain patterns emerge. These are my top ten traffic-killers.