Just wanted to point out that your traffic graph is typical for a relatively new blog. The reason your traffic dropped after the posts to reddit/hn is because those are anomalies. Your organic traffic from search is your real traffic rate. Building this up takes time, a lot of time. More than 1 year with constant blog posting.
Sad but true. I'm in the same boat and my traffic graph looks exactly the same as yours :)
Thanks for the insights, I've been very curious about traffic on blogs such as mine, I intend to make a monthly post that makes my trends transparent so others can see what I do.
Its the top graph. I post a lot to reddit, which is where those spikes come from.
So far I haven't managed to post a popular article on HN, although others have posted my articles and they have gotten onto the front page, which is a little annoying. Guess the system rates certain people a lot higher depending on their karma...
Wow, that's an interesting model for revenue. I'm happy to see it's also a successful one.
I /intend/ to publish 10 posts about the project Euler ( cowbelljs.blogspot.com/2011/12/projecteuler-001.html ), step back and improve on them greatly, adding a lot more detail and clarity such that you could learn some algo/math from them and start offering them as ebooks. I'm not a fan of ads on the blog, simply because google forced them to be excessive and annoying with my template.
Its getting there slowly - the problem is traffic, as you rightly identified earlier. Its slow to build, takes a lot of time and effort. The spikes from posting on reddit never last, so its either a question of constantly writing quality content and posting it, or having a massive marketing budget :)
Sad but true. I'm in the same boat and my traffic graph looks exactly the same as yours :)