The general formula is you have to nurture and build your own community. Quality over quantity. There are many examples of people aggregating and filtering content (http://iosdevweekly.com) to producing content (basically all sites from the smallest blog up to BuzzFeed). The metric if there is one is how engaged your community is. Do they open your regular cadence newsletter? Do your current readers forward your newsletters? You can game social media all you want and in the end the real thing is are you providing value to people in the community you are contributing to/part of. All those people who sell 2,000 books with a single email spent hundreds of hours growing their email list one by one. It is easy to write one blog post that goes viral. And to get them to come back and read what your write next - that is harder.
Grow your community, give back, deliver something unique that you can provide on a regular basis.
The reality is you don't own anything if you work for a company. But if you have 100 or 1000 mailing list opens - that is all yours.
The rhetorical question is do you want to make $12,000 a year or $120k/year. The catch hear is $120k is salaried and NOT geometrically scalable while the $12k refers to your own sales/ad revenue. That what you own and have built is scalable.
It is all about influence and/or providing what people want.