Recently I launched a new blog on Asian art and culture, called 7junipers.com. It’s a long-term project, and I have done virtually no promotion or link building for it yet. But I did photoblog a couple of images from the site for stumbleupon. You can see the resulting spikes in traffic on this chart (courtesy google analytics). From this you can see that while stumbleupon delivers a lot of traffic, it isn’t necessarily sticky. After both spikes my visits went right back to where they were before. It’s possible that some stumblers may have favorited the site or someone may have subscribed to its feed, so there could still be a small benefit down the road. Nonetheless, it looks like this has not been an effective traffic builder in this instance.
Nancy
You should add a few “come on” words to your descriptions; anything with sex in it, or words related to that always seem to bring an increase in traffic. But I’ve seen – from my own blog and participation in Bay Area Art Quake- that serious blogs dealing with art just have a very limited readership (and that’s a pity).