Hey Aditi – thanks for these questions.
The short answer is that I wrote every week and published on our blog, for the past 6 years 
The less glib answer is that we focused on a few things…
- Being consistent. Audiences accrue when there’s an expectation built up that a person has something valuable to say. That expectation can only happen if there’s been enough past experiences of value to go back and reference. As a result, a huge part of building an effective inbound engine is consistently producing value, over time. This could be as simple as writing one blog post per week (that’s where I started). Do that for at least 6 months consistently, promote it consistently, and you’ll slowly start to see that expectation build up… and an audience very slowly start to emerge.
- Optimizing for SEO. This is the obvious one. But for us, boy, did it pay off. I didn’t have any prior experience with SEO and learnt everything by devouring books and articles. You don’t need to hire a SEO specialist or firm to get started. It’s very possible to learn yourself. A few book that I read when getting my feet dirty with SEO:
- Writing on topics that people want to most learn about. The topic itself that you choose is critical. As a result, I would pay attention to what pain points our audience + customers would mention, what other news outlets are writing about, what is trending on Twitter, etc. to get a sense of what the most burning topics people wanted to learn. One of the best ways to do this is to use an SEO tool like SEMrush (that’s the one that we use) to look at keyphrases volume search. Additionally, I would “test” topics by tweeting about them, or talking about them in live presentations – and if something resonated particularly well, it’d be the foundation of a blog post that I’d then write.