First of all you need the foundations for a successful blog. Here are a few factors for you to bear in mind.
(a) In order to make a concerted attempt to reach specific blog visitors, ensure your blog has a niche topic. You could, for example use a hobby of collecting rare and unusual books or coins. This is sure to attract web visitors who are looking for these items, a rare book or coin.
(b) The use of categories/tags that are sub-topics of your main topic is always an excellent idea. For example, with rare books, interesting categories within this subject would be authors, genre, historic, illustrated, modern and so on.
(c) Make sure your content includes the keywords you wish to be linked with your niche blog as this will direct traffic to your website.
What to do next
So you have put the fundamentals in place and now you need to develop a community within your blog. This needs to be done in order to create a reason for visitors to come back and look at your website again and again, which may well lead to you setting up a membership site at some point in the future. Listed below are a few hints as to what is needed to build up a community within your blog.
(a) Your visitors need a way to make a contribution to your blog. Allow them to leave their comments on your posts and to put forward content to be considered for posting to your blog.
(b) Suggest to your visitors that they submit a link for you to consider adding to your blogroll and in exchange ask them to put a link back to your blog from theirs.
(c) Find articles within you niche by paying a visit to websites such as EzineArticles. This is a great way to add content to your website but make sure you give credit to the writer of the article.
Last But Not Least
Reward your blog visitors for continuing to come back to your website. Offer them some freebies or create a method for them to email a friend about your blog. You could even hold a competition for guest authors within your niche to put content on your blog and request that they share a link to the article on your blog from their own blog.