Link Building!

I use digg.com too. Aside from that I include my blog stephenstreets.blogspot.com in some blog aggregators like technorati and tons of other sites. Each time I want to get traffic for some new post on my blog, I use a few web pingers that pings to tons of web aggregators instead of pingining each site manually. Try pingomatic.com pingoat.com or even autopinger.com.

I think using articles to get backlinks is a great way.

I spend a lot of time getting backlinks via forum posts and also comments on like for like blogs. I've actually found the commenting one to be quite a good way of getting visitors and the off shoot of this is that I am now getting links from sites which I have never visited but have stumbled across my site via the comment I left in someone elses blog. The important thing to remember when doing this is to make sure your link back from the comment uses an appropriate tag but also that your comment is interesting and relevant, otherwise the blog owner will delete it for basically spamming.