There are a number of particular methods and combination methods that you can use to help encourage your blog. Here is some of the things which I do. They take a little work and I prefer to do it manually versus using software :
· Take your RSS feed and submit it to the top 25 RSS feed directories.
· Take the same RSS feed and submit it to RSS aggregator services like friendfeed, lifestream, profilatic, etc. So that every post you make also gets syndicated to each of these locations.