This is a guest post by Steven Snell. Mr. Snell designs websites and maintains a blog for Vandelay Website Design. You can read more of his writing and see his portfolio at www.vandelaydesign.com.
Social media websites such as Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and Stumble Upon send thousands of visitors to blogs and websites everyday. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of articles about becoming a top user of these sites to build your traffic. While they are all tremendous sources of traffic, getting a significant number of visitors from these sites can take a lot of effort—especially with Digg, Netscape, and Reddit.

If you’ve avoided social media marketing because you don’t have hours every day to spend submitting articles and voting on those submitted by other users, you are missing out on countless potential visitors.

For the average user the main problem with the most popular social media sites is that it can be difficult to generate any kind of traffic to your site. Most of us are completely overlooking the opportunity to benefit from 2nd tier social media sites that send decent levels of traffic and can make it easier for the time-starved blogger to succeed.

Literally hundreds of lesser-known social media sites exist that present far less competition for the top spots. Yes, they will send less traffic than Digg, but if you choose the right ones to use you can see substantial results.

Many people have been reading the posts on ProBlogger and this blog about the importance of good theme code and the role it plays in your search engine traffic.

Now, I’m a little biased , but I think one of the best ways to get a great theme with great code is to have it built that way; you get the best of both worlds: a custom theme that represents you perfectly, and great, search-engine-friendly code.

However, I’m also a realist, and know that many bloggers can’t/don’t want to put cash into their blogs, so I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some beautiful WordPress themes that also feature excellent, search-engine-friendly code. Read on to see the first five selections (in no particular order). (Hold your mouse over a “reason” to see a slightly longer explanation.)

As you know, creating a blog can be lots of fun. It’s also a lot of hard work, though, and that’s why it’s important to generate plenty of traffic to your site. After all, there’s nothing worse than pouring your heart and soul into your blog, only to discover that nobody is visiting!

So now for the $64,000 question. How does you effectively attract people to your blog? How do you actually do this and build up a blog site that will be known to many within a relatively short amount of time?