Aaron SW's latest series of articles have informative about tackling the hard problems. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve

Made to Stick is an excellent read on the subject of branding and marketing. http://www.heathbrothers.com/madetostick/

I used to run a blog in 2008 and I got it to 6.5million page views before I quit it and I was featured in the book "Blogging Heroes" along with the founders of Lifehacker, Engadget, Ars Technica, Gizmodo and Boing Boing.

My key strategy when I was growing my blog was to find existing communities that would like what I was writing and then build relationships with those communities.