I blog for work. I took a step back from product TechOps (we're a SaaS company) to write for us. We make a service that people like me, an ops engineer, would use. My rules for writing are I write about things that are interesting to me that fall within the general problem space and I don't sell product. I've struck on writing highly technical posts and including code or CLI examples of what I'm doing. If there's code I release GitHub repositories. A reader should be able to take what I wrote and instantly apply what they've learned. You can probably guess those posts outperform other posts anywhere from 2-5x depending on the popularity of the subject matter. If I strike gold we're looking at 20-30x performance.
The next key is promotion. I have a decent Twitter following (>1K) and have developed contacts with people in my profession. I schedule tweets for what I write that I think is really good. Hootsuite and Buffer can do that easily. If I want to strike gold I post to Reddit. I've posted here before but get minimal traction. I don't have enough time to invest in HN and just browse here casually. I spend time on Reddit regularly because of non-tech boards I love. (Hi /r/boston.) If I write something good for Reddit our traffic numbers see a significant spike. Those are the 20-30x performers.
All that said, ask yourself why you're writing. If you're writing for a specific audience then respect your audience. I've taken the talk up approach over talk down. I don't boil hard topics down to telling you what you should do without providing you a how. I'm also respectful of the communities where my audience congregates. That means I stay away from talking about our product. If my name is on something that discusses product I put those on LinkedIn and Twitter once or twice.
If you're writing for yourself, ask yourself again, are you writing for your enjoyment or your reputation? If you're writing for your enjoyment then whatever. Traffic numbers don't mean you have nothing of value to say. Just means you don't have an audience and that's going to happen today with the information saturation we all face. If you're writing for reputation, or because you'd like an audience to engage with what you've written for pure enjoyment, then promotion is key. I've used twitter because I'm on their regularly. My writing is only a small part of what I put onto twitter. I like posting pics of my cats, my food, and witty things I say to my girlfriend.
Wish I could share more and maybe be more articulate but need to work. FWIW, I have had a blog post become popular in the past week. Someone just filed a bug against once of the example repos. Knowing people are reading and inspecting my work to use it makes me happy and know that I'm doing something worthwhile. :)