It does not make sense to try getting lots of traffic to a poor blog. Your visitors will visit once and never return, wasting all your traffic-building efforts. Sometimes it just takes a few simple changes to make your blog outstanding, to make it something that people would want to link to and keep coming back to.

Here are some specific things you should check for:

Good Content
Are you providing valuable and unique content? Don’t just regurgitate what you see elsewhere. Provide your own unique ideas.

Update your blog daily. This is very important in the beginning. Later you can cut back to several times per week, but you need to post every day until your traffic snowball has started to build.

Clean and Easy-To-Read Design
Watch out for your colors. Make sure the text is easy to read. Black or dark text on a white or very light background is easiest to read.

The design should look attractive. It doesn’t have to be a custom design. There are a lot of free templates/themes available. Just pick one that looks nice and not too confusing.

No Ads
In the beginning, it is best not to have any ads on your blog. Wait until you have a good amount of traffic. If your traffic is low, you will not make money on ads anyway.

It is a lot easier for people to link to your blog when it is not covered in ads. Nobody wants to send their readers to a horrible ad-plastered blog, even if the content is good. They want to link to blogs that look nice too.