I used to work very hard to produce low quality content and post it on hn twitter and whatnot. It was depressing to see very little traffic.
So i reduced the number of post, stopped posting on HN. Suddenly i have more traffic then ever. Though google is mostly responsible for it.
What i started doing more often is link to people i find interesting in my articles, that's the new blog roll replacement, and somehow it has pushed those to link back to me.
Ps: don't give up because no one likes your content, the majority will not like it anyway.