You'll find many posts on how to increase your blog's audience, but these next 5 tips put together might just create the winning recipe to increase your blog influence. Influence is the organic engine to audience.
Step 1 - Content focus
To increase your blog influence, the first step is to be content focused. Write your blog with one or several specific virtual social communities in mind. A social community is a group of people who are INTERCONNECTED online (on twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums...) and who share a PASSION for a topic or an expertise (Golf lovers, Healthcare CIOs, Comics collectors, Parents of teens, Cloud Computing experts, etc...). A community is NOT a brand or company name (Apple might the exception!). The choice of the community is the key as an influence is only relevant in a context. In other words, if you really want to be influential in any community, you'll need to create content relevant to this community. The more focus is your content, the higher influence you can achieve.
Step 2 - Listen
Once you have selected and mapped your community (identifying people, mostly bloggers), the next step is to listen to what they are saying. You'll find hot topics, key trends and many ideas for your next posts and articles. Feed your community with posts that talk about the community pains, interests and challenges.
Step 3 - References and links
Increase the impact of your blog by creating articles or posts that are "community aware". In each article or post, reference other influencers and conversations with links and hence get a very high probability to get quotes, retweets and coverage.
Step 4 - Blogroll
Create a blogroll with high and medium influencers and make sure your blog is SEO compatible.
Step 5 - Measurement
Define the right measurement metrics. You can't improve what you don't define. Many metrics can apply: # of mentions, # of retweets, # of links and visitors...
The internet is rich in articles on how to become an influential and respected community member, so dive in and have fun!