There's no magic bullet IMO
Create at least 100 articles first. No less than 100.
Then get some action from social media (reddit, twitter, facebook preferrably). This step is crucial to justify the blog popularity. You can get Reddit boosts (guess where wink wink) to get you to the front page of a good sub. Perhaps that'll land you a bunch of links from aggregators and shit. Repeat this about 10x with different articles. This should get your site "alive".
Then after you get some organic traffic and score some social media virals, proceed to request approval.