Know your audience

There are several tools available that can help you to gauge reader interest on various topics. For example, you can use HitTail to research topics to write about. HitTail will give you a list of the search terms used by those who visit your blog through a search engine. These search terms list can give you ideas for your future blogs.

Add features like bookmarks, 'email this post to a friend,' RSS readers etc. This will increase your visibility as well as help readers to come back. Such tools will promote your blog and increase traffic.

Technorati is one of the most popular search engine for blogs. Use Technorati tags at the end of your blog posts. This will help classify your blog posts by topic and add them to their index.

Add keywords

To increase your blog's visibility, you can also add related keywords in the title of the blog. These keywords will help the blog in getting picked by the crawlers.

Tools such as http://www.keyworddiscovery.com or http://www.wordtracker.com can help you see how many people have searched for a given phrase, helping you understand which keywords to use.

Use titles as headline to attract interest. However, these title should be no longer than 10-12 words.

Participate in forums

Participate actively in forums and discussion groups. This will help you generate ideas for your blog. Find out what are the most hottest issues of public interest and discuss that in your blog. You can also link your post to the similar forums or groups on the Net.