I’m always looking for new ways to entice readers to subscribe to my blogs’ feeds, add my blogs to their Technorati Favorites, sign up to get my feed by email, and add my posts to social bookmarking sites. Feedburner has the links for the feeds, Wordpress has a plugin for the social bookmarking, but there are lots of people posting graphics in the “Web 2.0″ style that are really eye-catching.

But what I’m wondering is, do readers really use bookmarking icons? For example, at the end of this post you’ll see the graphic that says “Bookmark” with icons that link to Digg, Delicious, Stumble, and more. But do readers actually use them? Or do readers who regularly submit posts to Digg or Delicious or who often Stumble posts have their own methods for doing that? I know that personally, I use the Stumble toolbar to Stumble posts, and to be honest, I never use Digg unless someone I know emails me and asks me to Digg something for them.

And yet, I have the bookmarking plugin on all my blogs. I think at the least, the icons will remind people that hey, I want to Stumble this post or add it to Digg or whatever. Then they can use their own methods to do so. On my other blogs I get a ton of traffic from Stumble, so I plan to keep the icons on my blogs for now. What about you?