Periodically I search the Internet for traffic building ideas and find the same old arguments and ideas trotted out over and over again. And they don't work. Here are some of the things I have tried for traffic and how they have performed;

Submitting to Digg, Stumbleupon and others
I submit articles regularly to these types of sites. I don't apparently have a big enough network on Digg to ever get published but I do get a few hits this way. Nothing much but a few. Posting comments on other folks published articles can get many more hits but at the risk of being labeled a spammer and having your account frozen. Stumbleupon has been useless - no hits at all except in a few cases where some popular Stumbleupon user has submitted one of my articles and then I have had thousands of hits.

Moral of the story - you need to invest time and energy into building a network on these sites to get any real traffic.

Article submissions
Submitting articles to various sites including using Blog Carnivals is also hard work and time consuming. Again, t brings a few visitors but the biggest benefit is climbing up the Technorati rankings.

Traffic Generators
Using traffic generators certainly brings traffic if you can be bothered to use the surfbar to earn credits. The problem is that these surfers are doing what you are doing - simply using a surfbar to generate credits - they most likely don't interact with your blog and probably never come back. If you want to try one though - click on the banner above...

Search engine Submission
This is plainly a must and a lot of my traffic is now coming via google searches. The traffic grows steadily through time and it does appear that browsers gained using search engines spend more time on the site clicking through other articles. It takes time to develop this stream of visitors but it seems that these are the visitors that you want in the sense that they stay around a while.

Friends and Family
This one is a good way to get started. Get friends and family to visit your blog. They'll do it and will often stay loyal and tell others too.

Commenting on Other Blogs
This doesn't work much so far as I can tell. I have tried it and get one or two hits but nothing worth the effort.

I'm looking for new ways to generate traffic all of the time, so if you have any ideas do leave a comment....