A business blog is a great way to reach potential new customers. However, when you first start out, the search engines are unlikely to send visitors your way. (And we’re really talking about Google, right?) Google wants to see if you have staying power and publish new content regularly. After a few months, when you’ve established yourself, the search engines will start sending you traffic. But what do you do in the meantime to attract visitors to your site to read all your great content?

Based on my experience in blogging, becoming active on social media is an effective and simple way to start generating traffic. Here are some tips:

1. Publish your blog posts to social media sites

It's likely you are using WordPress. There are a number of WordPress plugins that will automatically send your content to Ping.fm. Then, you can choose where you want Ping.fm to share your content, including LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. There are other networks you can select, but those are the biggies.

2. Leverage your LinkedIn membership

Don’t just put up a profile; become active. You can belong to up to 50 groups on LinkedIn. Post your blog entries to the appropriate groups—and your own status updates—and you will get a lot of traffic back to your blog. Become active in the discussions. When I first started blogging, LinkedIn was my main source of traffic. Now it’s search engines, but I still receive tons of visitors a month from LinkedIn.

3. Join Ning communities

Facebook and LinkedIn aren’t the only games in town. You can form your own community on Ning or join an existing one. I joined the Employee Engagement Network. I’ve commented on discussions and posted original blog entries, all linking back to my own site. I’ve even contributed quotes to two of their e-books.

4. Be active on Facebook

Build a fan page and get people to “Like” it so that your content is posted to their news feeds—with links back to your blog. The groups on Facebook don’t have as many members as on LinkedIn but they will grow.

5. Join support groups

Bloggers Helping Bloggers is a LinkedIn Group where people read and comment on each other's blogs, with a link back to their own blog, and retweet each other's posts. This generates SEO juice and attracts more visitors. Members of my Google Group retweet each other so that our posts get distributed to all their Twitter followers.

6. Share with personal friends

Make your friends aware of your posts so they can comment, retweet, Digg, Stumble and vote on Reddit when they like one of your posts. Be sure to reciprocate when you can help spread the word about their business.

7. Do guest posts

Research blogs that align with your business, then offer to write a post for them. You'll get a backlink to your blog that will people will click and—voila—they are on your site. This also solidifies your postion as an expert in your field.

A blog, in my view, is the hub of all your social media activities. But you need to actively promote it if you want to attract visitors who could eventually turn into customers.

OPEN Cardmember Jeannette Paladino is writer-in-chief of Write Speak Sell. She is passionate about helping organizations leverage social media to burnish their brands, increase their revenues, and engage employees as brand advocates.