My blog and no visitors

[fix8ed]

I'm kind of in the same boat as the OP; I have a blog and forum that just started. What I did was optimize the domain for google immediately. I signed into Webmaster Tools (on Google) and created a Sitemap and made sure my robots.txt file was accessible. After about a week, I started seeing traffic from Google off of keywords. Granted the traffic is not earth shattering (maybe 50-70 unique hits per day) but its a start.

After that, I signed up on a few Blog directories and registered my feed with Feedburner.

I also added a plug-in for my blog that dropped the social networking site links to each post and now all readers can digg, stumble, etc. any of my posts.

Next, I went to forums that were relative to my blog's subject and started posting teaser posts (i.e. I'd post the first paragraph of the blog and then provide a link for "read more...").

So far this is working but I'm sure there more efficient techniques out there. I've noticed that if I combine forum posts with social networking posts, my traffic spikes on those days but slowly tapers off. The problem I am having now is keeping return visitors. I'm hoping that with enough time, I can build a following.
Hope that helps.