Good content is definitely essential; add options for wider referrers such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Accept requests for writing a topic. Your readers are going to be the ones making your blog popular, what I like to do is to please them first with contents that they would be interested in reading.

Not long ago, I wrote on a suggestion that one of my readers gave to me, and just one post on Twitter of her talking about my blog drastically increased the number of views.