If you're the sort who worries about how much visitation your blog is getting, aside from the very good advice to make sure you post regularly and make your content interesting and unique, you might find that a good network of contacts on Twitter can make a big difference!
Have a look at my blog's visitation numbers over the past 2 months:
Admittedly, I'd left my blog in limbo for quite some time and wasn't posting a lot, but take a look at the increase in traffic from mid-late July... This corresponds to when I started to use Twitter more regularly and make more of an effort to widen my personal network of contacts.
Whenever you have a new post ready for your blog, you post a quick link to it in Twitter. If you have the right network of contacts interested in the same or similar issues you are, you are automatically going to get some good traffic come through very quickly. Also, if they deem your blog content to be good and relevant, your Twitter friends will "re-tweet" it to their own extended networks - resulting in yet more traffic.
The two activities actually complement each other very well - as Twitter is more about quick messages and references, while the blog allows you to really explore things in much more depth. The quick notification on Twitter makes a handy heads-up, but also allows your network of contacts decide whether the content of a particular post will whet their interest (and that of their own network of followers).
I've noticed one other beneficial side-effect as well... Since I started posting links to new blog entries on Twitter, my blog's Google PageRank has gone from 2 to 4 in a matter of weeks.
This all may be self-evident to some people reading this, but in case you haven't considered it yet, you might like to explore ways you can make your blog and Twitter activity complement each other more!
:-)
