Monetizing Blogs, Designing Blog for Traffic

Hi, this is my first post here.

I have two questions, both related to blog traffic.

I have a politics site that's a pagerank six site. It's around #9 on Google for a number of common words and phrases. However, for some reason I don't get very much traffic. I get about 100 hits a day, approximately.

I haven't posted regularly, though. Maybe I need to post more and to write more original articles as opposed to linking to externals.

How would I go about increasing traffic to a PR6 site? I'd think it would be getting more traffic than that. I have about 4000 inbound links.

Secondly, I've just started a blog for self-help, efficiency and time management. Part of the reason is that I think it'll have a better ad CTR than a politics site. Also, it'll appeal to 100% of the readership of efficiency sites instead of 50% of the readership and alienating the other 50%, as my political site probably does.

I want to build this site from the ground up to optimize and draw traffic.

My strategy is as follows:
1) Write 30-60 high quality, longish (1000 word) articles in the coming month. I write fast so this shouldn't be a problem, it'll take me under an hour per article.

2) Once I have a good selection of articles on different related topics, I'll get inbound links from established efficiency blogs and sites. I write for a high pagerank site and it shouldn't be a problem to get links from them.

I'll also be submitting to blog carnivals every day, performing RSS pings and doing anything else I can think of or what people suggest.

3) Continue to produce high quality subject-specific articles, one or two a day. Possibly I'll write one 4-pager and two quickies, every day.

4) At 5 months or so, I'll put ads on the site. It'll be fairly ad-heavy but they'll be text ads mostly so I don't think the readership will complain.

What I'm hoping is that the quality of my writing and the length and hopefully good thought of the posts will help me develop a loyal readership. From there I will look into other avenues such as book and merchandise promotions.

What do you experts think of this strategy? How can I improve it? What other traffic building methods are there for blogs?

Thanks!

Instead of posting all of your articles on your blog, submit a few of them to the article distribution banks and include a link back to your blog.

Nobody seems to know for sure if there really is a penalty for duplicate content, but you probably shouldn't post those articles on your blog as well as submitting them. (I don't, but I'm not sure about the penalty either.)

Duplicate content thing is still a topic of debate and its not a fact.

So why not post it to article repositories.

Carnivals don't actually store or duplicate your articles. If they did I wouldn't be using them. They just provide a backlink and I can't see that as bad.

Anything else?

Leave sincere comments on others blogs, this will also help you to build traffic on your blog.