So I see pretty modest traffic to my site. Discounting bots/scrapers, it's about a thousand visits a month, so it's not a lot. I also don't have a newsletter, which definitely doesn't help.
Honestly, you really should focus on a niche. For example, Simon Willison [1] keeps his blog super consistent, he's the AI journalist. Josh Comeau [2] is another good example from Hacker News: probably 99% of his content is front-end design and development. Becoming (or establishing oneself) as an expert in some space goes a long way toward increasing your subscriber count.
My articles are mostly satirical in nature and have all determinism of a literary brownian motion machine (writing on algorithms, thought experiments, fiction, etc.) so there’s not a particularly cohesive identity to the site.
Another thing that is often mentioned is that you need to publish regularly and often. I tend to be a perfectionist, and spend a lot of time crafting each article with custom illustrations, animations, and interactive elements. This works for people like Bartosz Ciechanowski [3], but I'm not sure it helps drive traffic for me personally.
[1] - https://simonwillison.net
[2] - https://www.joshwcomeau.com/svg/interactive-guide-to-paths
[3] - https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch
