Increasing traffic to your blog boils down to coming up with "a total package" for your readers.
Please understand that most people that will go to your blog are looking for some information and once they have it, they will never return.
You have to profile who your target audience is and come up with topics that would pull them from search engine results and just as importantly pull them deeper into the guts of your site.
So, this is not just a question of picking the right keywords and producing the right kind of content.
It's also a question of arranging your content in such a way that for every additional page that they read, the overall value that they get from your site increases tremendously.
This is how you "scale" the experience value of your readers.
Now, you may be thinking: "Okay! This is nice terminology and everything, but what's the bottom line?"
Well, the bottom line is this translates to more money for you.
Because the longer you get people to stay on your site and the more pages you get them to view, the higher the chance that they would click on an ad or do something else that would add extra dollars to your bank account.
That's the bottom line.
And depending on your niche, the best way to play this game is to get them to sign up for a mailing list and keep sending them regular updates.
With enough traffic volume from all the page views that go with it, you increase your chances of people clicking on ads.
Now, the ultimate level is to sell your own products.
You're not just putting links in there to ClickBank or any other big affiliate program.
Those are well and good, but if you're really serious about making money from your blog, even if you're in a niche that has a fairly low level of traffic, you have to come up with your own products.
The best part of all of this is that you're in control.
You're in control of the sales page, you're in control of the experience, you're in control of the quality of the product.
And you can then even come up with modular products that build on top of each.
This way, throughout the life of your mailing list, you stand to sell your products to your customer base many times over.