Don’t. Build it and they will come (probably). Try and focus on the style and content of the blog. Try to keep updating the blog on a regular basis. Make it easy for people to subscribe to the blog by creating an RSS feed - Feedburner is a popular, free choice. If you have succeeded in getting people to visit the blog and, better, maybe even subscribe to it, try to keep new material coming otherwise the blog will surely wither and die together with the interest of the your audience.

It is worth setting up pings so the main blog search engines index your blog. I manually ping Technorati after posting a new article (and check my posting gets indexed in due course) and just let Feedburner automatically ping a few more blog services.

I have also started to include Technorati tags at the end of the article. Initially I was a little reluctant to include tags that are specific to Technorati as it may be superceded in the future by another technology (remember how Altavista got obliterated by Google) but the use of Technorati tags does appears to be standard practice in the blogging community and does help in driving traffic to the site.

Try not to succumb to the temptation to go around adding meaningless comments (e.g. ‘Great blog!’) to other blogs in a subtle effort to get people to come and visit your blog. Even though, you succeeded in passing the onerous word verification test, this is not much better than spam and some might consider it rude. Instead, try to provide some useful contribution to the topic in question.

Do not put Google Adsense ads on your blog. Ads put me off almost immediately and waste valuable space on the screen. The dot com boom and been and gone. I would love it if you prove me wrong but no-one is going to get rich from a personal blog.

Don’t become obsessed by the statistics for your blog. However, this is easier said than done and I find myself spending time, pouring over the Web logs and statistics reports for my blog. Maybe the analysis of the Web statistics (spiders, robots, RSS readers and the occasional human being) what was popular, the growth of the blog over time, spikes, the relative popularity of different referrers etc would be the basis for a interesting article.