Today I came across a post at BlogSecurity.net called Should You Display a Subscriber Count? Here David discussed the pros and cons of showing how many subscribers your blog has, and he brings up many good points to consider.

But one thing that David wrote in this post peaked my curiousity.

Out of interest, BlogSec currently sits at around 450-550 subscribers. We started BlogSec in May, so we are growing by an average of around 100 subscribers per/month.

Wow! BlogSecurity.net began 6 months ago and now sits at 450-550 subscribers.

As part of a cross blog conversation (I was introduced to this concept by Heather at Home With Heather), I would like to ask David what methods he used to gain so much traffic in such a short period of time, and which method he found to be most effective.

The going advice includes:

• writing quality content,
• posting often,
• commenting on other blogs,
• blog carnivals,
• social networking, and
• using paid advertising, like Adwords.

While all these methods are sound practices, I am not convinced that these alone can lead to fast growth. Is there a secret that I am missing?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term “cross blog conversation”, it is basically an interaction where (to quote Heather);

One blogger will write a post asking something of another blogger. That blogger will respond in a post on their blog (instead of simply commenting back) and ask a question back to the first blogger.