Running competitions to popularize your blog

I was reading a couple of interesting posts about having competitions on your blog in order to popularize it. The idea here is to have a competition on your blog that will either encourage your existing readers to do something that you wished for them to do like subscribe to your feed or to leave comments or to try and attract new readers to your blog. Here are the two articles that caught my attention

The Costs and Benefits of Running a Competition on Your Blog
How to Run a Successful Competition on Your Blog

So I decided to check out some competitions that are going on and here is one example

Get to Know the Blogger… ME!!! (And win a free ad spot, too!)

and a shortcut to all the other competitions out there

Blog Catalog - Blog Competitions

This surely seems like an interesting way to draw traffic to your blog but what I have learnt over time is that readers who read your blog will come to your blog as long as they can relate to the content on your blog. So it really does not matter if you have a competition or not to draw the traffic to your blog. So if you write good articles and advertise enough about those articles the traffic will automatically increase to your blog. By having a competition you may see a temporary spurt in the number of visitors to your blog but the idea is to be able to sustain and grow the reader base.