I'm sure you've seen articles on different blogs about how to increase your traffic and, if your blog is monetized, how to make more money off that traffic. Some of them will recommend that you have your blog submitted to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other social networks. Heck, I may have mentioned it once or twice myself.

It's okay if your blog gets submitted to these places. It's going to happen whether you ask for it or not. If you write something that one of your readers (whether that reader is another blogger or not) thinks is "digg worthy", it will get submitted to Digg. The same goes for the other services. It's also okay to use traffic programs. There's a simple caveat to all of it. It's only temporary.

For the past few weeks, you may have noticed that I have avoided writing anything that would be considered "digg worthy". One of the obvious reasons is that I was temporarily on a host that had severely limited bandwidth. The other reason is that I like to be able to connect to my blog in order to do things, which I can't do while the "digg effect" is going on. I also like it when my regular readers are able to connect and do their thing.

Organic blog growth is what I define as gaining traffic naturally. I'm talking about "word of mouth" or "word of blog" advertising. This is what I have been concentrating on and it has pretty much stabilized my traffic growth. I'm getting between 100 and 200 visits a day on any given day, up from 20 to 40 before February. My traffic comes from other blogs, search engines, and places that the analytics can't identify. I still get some traffic from Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, but it's normal search traffic from their services. I also still get traffic from Plime, even though I haven't logged in there more than once or twice in the last month.

I belong to some of the popular social networks and I visit and comment once in awhile, but not frequently. I also visit a lot of blogs. I mean a LOT of blogs. I don't always comment — I comment when I think I can add to the discussion. You want to know something? Because a lot of bloggers belong to the same social networks I do, they get to see my picture on their little widgets. Curiosity on their part becomes traffic on my part. My blog drive-bys and the pingbacks (and the obvious links on Technorati) drive traffic back to my blog as well. I can consider all of these things part of organic blog growth because they're going to happen whether I try really hard or not.

Organic blog growth does not mean going HOG WILD. If you look at the numbers in my archives widget, you can't help but notice that I've been posting more and more as each month goes by. That's HOG WILD. There's no reason in the world that I, or anyone else, needs to post that much. Once a day is more than enough. The secret is quality content, not frequent content. Postings need to be at regular intervals, but even one per day is not required. Having just said all that, my frequent postings are part of my own habits and not something I would recommend to anyone else.

Am I trying to make a point here? No, not really. I'm just dishing out food for thought.