For a while I had stumble upon voting links on my site to allow stumblers to add their votes, but they don’t even seem to do that.

I’ve been stumbled once or twice and sometimes it will bring in a huge amount of new visitors, but I rarely find that they stick. I think stumbling kind of feeds into ADHD - you know, people look for 30 seconds, say “thats cooool!” and are out of there. Personally I’ll only ever stumble something if I really love it, I know that people like a bit of back scratching on stumbleupon but I don’t feel like stumbling is the place to do it.

On the other hand Twitter is great for promoting your friends, re tweeting is fast and simple, also tweeting to publicise a new blog post is a good way to reach those who don’t use a feed reader. I don’t have a huge following on Twitter but I do find I get a good number of hits from there.

I think the good old “mouth to mouth” is still best for quality traffic

I think there will always be blogs that will draw allot of traffic..those filled with information, scientific or otherwise.

For me..I found that its all about community. Reading other blogs commenting..forming friendships.

I am sure I am not alone when I say we all love comments. I also love to give a comments, however short it might be, to let the blogger know that I appreciate their effort, time etc put into their post. I have to say..that I tend not to do this if bloggers dont comment back after a time..I continue to read their blog but I assume they just dont comment or care about comments.

I know there are those out there who read thru readers etc and don’t comment.. Commenting takes time, I can appreciate that..it doesn’t work for everyone.

But I can say..if you comment, your are forming more of a community out there..appreciating one anothers art and giving thanks for it.

We are all out here expressing ourselves in one way or another..Say hi..comment..one word..Hi..we cant know everyone out there..but connect with those that you resonate with.
Betcha that person reading your comment will feel connected somehow.to u .and wanta know more about You!
Might like your blog..might pass it on.
You will be read!

That being said..I recently started using Twitter and Facebook to promote my blog..it brings in some hits..but not nearly as many as with those of friendships.

So take that for what its worth..2 cents..
I am not a Nature blogger full of knowledge..just one out here discovering,Nature, blogging and community.

However, day in and day out, like Seabrooke and Susannah, most of my traffic comes through search engines. My blog posts start appearing in Google search results within about an hour after publication, sometimes with a rank of 20th to 50th depending on the competition for the specific search term. However, once my regulars start visiting the post, Google smiles on me, and the new post will quickly shoot up in the rankings, often reaching the top 10 within a day or so. One thing I’ve noticed is that, when the title of my post includes a specific, interesting, but not too common search term, like “are robins a sign of spring?” or “we found a baby robin,” the ranking for searches using that term can often hit the top 5 and then stay there for months (and in the cases of older blogs, for years). It doesn’t seem to work as well if I just include the one-word name of an animal, like “wood duck” or “water scorpion.”

Nature blogs seem to be one of the few sources of new natural history Web content these days, at least for the relatively obscure topics that I write about. That makes me wonder about what my real responsibility is here. Of course, I try to write timely (especially seasonal) material for the folks who will read my posts in the days immediately after I write them. But now I also try to think about the folks who visit my blog posts months later (or a year later for the really seasonal stuff) as they try to answer a specific question or research a specific topic.

One of my guiding principles comes from something Mike Spock says about museum exhibits: “Never dead end a visitor.” So, I try to embed at least a few links to specific, relevant Web content within my posts, plus I almost always include a list of what I consider to be good and reliable resources at the end of the post. Sometimes those are blogs, usually not.

These search-engine visitors rarely become regular readers, but at least I’ve helped them follow up on their interest, however fleeting it may be.

To get back on topic: I installed Stumble on my tool bar, but I rarely remember to use it. Only a few folks have Stumbled on my blog so far.

I’ve had a couple of regular readers submit my posts to StumbleUpon, and I get the occasional bit of traffic from it, but never very much - with one exception. One day a post (about goldfinches, incidentally) was submitted to the “unknown” category. I got over 900 hits from that one stumble. I suspect that vast majority of those stumblers didn’t return, because within a couple of days my traffic was back to normal levels. It was exciting to see that spike in visits, but it didn’t seem to me like I derived a lot of long-term benefit from it.

I’ve found that maybe 75% of my traffic comes from Google searches. People looking for info on milk snakes, giant water bugs, grapevine beetles, snapping turtle eggs, and house centipedes probably constitute a quarter of the visits I get each day. A lot of new followers arrive by this route. Even above blog carnivals, leaving comments elsewhere, the NBN membership, or anything else proactive that I’ve done, the most successful traffic-generator I’ve tried has simply been writing good, informative posts about subjects people want to know more about.

I do make a point of linking to relevant blogs in my own blog posts.

I have had a few spikes in traffic after a post of mine was Stumbled. A few, and quickly flattened out. Mostly, I see a visitor from there once or twice a week.

I just barely got started on Twitter, so I don’t know what effect it will have. I get an occasional visitor via Facebook, and blog carnivals bring in a few, but most of my traffic comes from searches.

I Follow quite a few blogs, and have a few Followers, myself. I don’t know if this makes any difference; mostly, I read blogs in Google Reader, which doesn’t show up on their Sitemeter. It’s only when I go on over to the blog itself, in the case of a truncated post, or wanting to read or make a comment, that my Following would have any effect. I assume the same goes for my Followers.

(I wonder about that “Like this” button on Google Reader; does it register with the blog, or only on Google?)

Where I do see a measurable effect is in the reaction to comments I make on other blogs and forums. Since these are usually on topics other than my own blog’s,* I doubt that many of these visitors come back. I could be wrong.

*I am a regular (twice daily) reader and occasional commenter of ScienceBlogs.com, and a member of a forum that includes several of the ScienceBloggers. And I follow a few political blogs, and independent science bloggers.

I confess that I do watch my Sitemeter closely. I am immoderately pleased with spikes, and equally immoderately disappointed when the inevitable crash comes. I like being read! But I derive more solid satisfaction from the comments on my posts: this is what it’s about, not numbers, but dialogue, sharing, new friends and old.

Which, of course, makes me totally lose faith in the Internet.