My blog is basically a women’s magazine with a tech section. Loads of traffic is great, but the users of D & D are mostly techie males who aren’t going to subscribe to a blog about skinny jeans. And, I too, did not get a spike in ad revenue relative to the amount of traffic, again because my ads are about beauty and fashion, something D&D users don’t really care about.

What was better though was the secondary exposure of my blog to more mainstream outlets through the D &D exposure to readers who fit more of my audience. All techie guys have girlfriends, wives, moms, sisters, etc. and there are plenty of other news outlets who cater to a tech laymen’s audience.

There’s no question that Digg brings the greatest surge of traffic. Twenty or thirty thousand hits in a day is typical. But I’m not convinced that Digg traffic provides any lasting value. Few Digg users subscribe to my content, and few become regular readers.

Traffic from del.icio.us, however, is more valuable. My impression is that a greater number of del.icio.us users have sites of their own, and they’re more likely to drive secondary traffic to my content. Something featured at del.icio.us is also more likely to get picked up at, say, Lifehacker or a similar site than something from Digg.

But it’s all good. My goal is to provide quality content that leads to a solid, growing readership. I figure everything else is secondary to that.

I’ve yet to be blessed with traffic from Delicious so I can’t compare the two.

My opinion to why this is so is people who use digg and del.icio.us are a little more “computer savvy” and have learned to not click on most ads because so many “bad ads” brought them to malware. They get a bad case of ad blindness after being burned a few times.

As far as link and sign-ups, I’m thinking they’d be about the same. Like I said, the del.icio.us folks are more likely to already be subscribers.

And, I’m of the opinion that as soon as I create something worthy of being on the front page at Digg or Reddit or del.icio.us, I’ll get there about the same time in all of them, since there’s a lot of commonality between the services.