(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)
I’ve mentioned a little bit of this in part 5: Adding your blog to search engines and directories, but it was a little off-topic there (since it hadn’t really anything to do with search engines or directories), and there’s more to be said, so here’s part 10.
The important message of this section of the series is this (with apologies to John Donne): no blogger is an island.
What does this mean? Think of a store owner. Does he simply open the store, choose a set of products, guess some reasonable prices and then sell them? If he sticks to that, he won’t be very successful. It’s very likely that he visits the competition (both near and far) quite often. Doing that, he learns of trends, gets new ideas, learns about what sells, how much things usually sell for, and adapts himself to not only be competitive, but to provide the extra “edge” so that people will choose his own store.
Now, while the competitive aspect isn’t so important here (but it may not be irrelevant to some kinds of blogs, especially if you plan to ever be a professional blogger), there’s still the learning part, the staying current part, the getting new ideas part.
Therefore, my suggestion is: find other blogs, especially those with similar themes to yours. Google, as always, helps. So may blog exchangers. Find blogs that link to articles in yours (either by looking at your site’s statistics, or by using something like Technorati, which will probably be the focus of a future part of this series). Read (by visiting them regularly, or, even better, subscribing to their RSS feeds) some of those blogs.
Don’t copy their articles, of course, but if you find one that you want to write about, link to it! Like “so and so of blog X said: (excerpt).” Then you add your own thoughts and opinions. Be sure that you are linking to their article, maybe in the “blog X” part. Not only will those other bloggers appreciate the links and the new readers they get from your blog, but it’s very likely that they will, due to that link (which, again, they may have found about from statistics, Technorati or other ways), visit your own blog. Maybe they’ll like it, maybe they’ll start to read it regularly, too. Maybe they’ll even link to some of your articles, the way you did to theirs - and that means more exposure, more visits, and more regular readers.
This has happened to this very blog several times, for various articles - and this blog is only about a week old! 
But wait, there’s still more: comments! (there’s the bit I had already mentioned in part 5, remember?). You can get new visits by reading other blogs, and posting good, insightful comments in other blogs, and filling in the “Your URL” part that most blogging software asks for, or mentioning (only when appropriate, and never in a gratuitous way!) an article in your blog, like in “I talked more about this subject here: (your link)” - maybe only at the end of your comment, never making that be the whole comment. Again, use common sense, and courtesy - if you comment in other blogs just to post links to yours, you’ll be little better than a spambot posting links to casinos and generic viagra in every blog it can find.
Related posts:
RSS feed
«(…) mentioning (…) an article in your blog, like in “I talked more about this subject here: (your link)” - maybe only at the end of your comment, never making that be the whole comment.»
Or: pingbacks/trackbacks?
Those seem to be dying, these days, after being utterly abused for spam and the like. Much like Usenet.