One of the questions which comes up often when I am giving talks about blogs is how to increase traffic to your blog.
Well, Trent Hamm has written a 10-step program which he followed to take his blog from 0 to 12,000 subscribers in six months.
There are some great tips in there - I especially like the 'Listen to Del.icio.us' point:
The most valuable content that a blogger can create is the type of content that readers want to come back to time and time again and also that they want to share with others. These pieces will continually provide value to you, and the surest way to identify such content is to know how many people have saved a particular post at del.icio.us. I keep track of this by using Feedburner's site statistics package and enabling the "flare" that shows this information. Posts that have del.icio.us bookmarks are usually the ones I use as guidelines for what works on my blog - if I try something different and no one bookmarks it, I usually realize that it's a bad idea. I've found that time and time again, del.icio.us is the best barometer of good content.
Absolutely agree, Del.icio.us is a phenomenally powerful filter for quality material. It is another Mechanical Turk in action.