[bluehatbrit]

People will follow you if they find most of your content useful or interesting, and it's much easier to make your content useful initially and experiment to find the interesting stuff.

My most popular articles are very simple ones answering common questions. Those kind of posts are pretty easy to make and seem to have continued traffic with no effort. It's mostly search engine traffic and then a bunch of company wikis that must be linking to some of my guides.

If you want to go hard you on audience building you probably want a good 60-40% of your content to clearly deliver value to the reader. Large how-to guides are good here, especially if you focus on a specific technology set.

The rest of your posts can be the more opinion pieces that you experiment with over time and refine. That gives people an easy pathway into your blog via search engines and plenty of content to explore once they get there.