With the former blog, I had the social part mostly down since I told every person I could about it, and sometimes wrote 4 posts per day, and this eventually helped with search. There was never a newsletter but many signed up to receive posts in their inbox.
The biggest problem is the age-old one: if the right people saw the blog(s) then it'd be more of a hit. Since I mostly write for pleasure, as I mentioned in another comment, I don't need huge quantities of people reading what I write, but it'd sure be nice to be appreciated (to go from 1-10 views per day up to 100). With the old blog, I'd be "disappointed" if I only got 500 views per day. Now I'd be happy with 75-100.
I'll look at how to reinforce the pillars you mention. Thanks
It's tricky though, because Twitter is a micro-blogging service, and Facebook has Groups and Pages.
a) first you need to get one of them right
then b) "the strong feed the poor", convert them from one channel into the other. and yeah, if you do it baldy (i.e. newsletter popups, constant reminder to follow you on fb, ...) 99% will hate you, but you can iterate on the 1%.
the big questions: why do you need the quantity? if you do not have a quantity traffic dependent business case (i.e. adsense) then a few people who value your input can be more rewarding then 10 000 skimming over your content and clicking away the newsletter popups & follow me on fb call-to-actions. the strategy follows the goal, "lots of traffic" in itself is a poor goal.