Write good content. Ask feedback.

Write a lot - often thought provoking / controversial stuff. Share everywhere.

When I was in High School (like 8 years ago) I had a blogger site where I wrote and shared random stuff... I just discovered Linux, was massively impressed and went out of my way to burn Windows -> shared on both a Windows Forum and Ubuntu Forum.
Got like 30+ comments, from both haters and those who liked the article. And my adsense revenue sky-rocketed. :P

I think putting out well researched and valuable content is the best growth strategy. People will share your stuff :)

Write content that solve a problem others are facing, no matter how small the problem is, with actionable steps.
Then help out people who face the problem in reddit by replying to their thread / post, and put link to your blog if the answer is too long.

Here's an approach, not the only one obviously: Write a big valuable resource rather than tiny bs blog posts every week or day. This way you can break the big piece into small pieces when you're marketing it across different channels. You'll get more links this way, and you're more likely to provide value to anybody that reads. Save the small insights for something like Twitter, and use the success there to make more big pieces of content.

I have quite a few friends that told me they would skip right to writing their book or a big guide rather than doing small pieces of content, if they could do it over again.