Anyone who has started a blog without already having a lot of connections knows that it takes a really long time to get a lot of readers. As you are building up more and more readers means more and more content, more and more activity, but it really takes time and if you're looking for 10,000 readers a month in your first month you better know someone and have a lot of referrals and links from popular blogs. That's probably not going to happen and that doesn't mean that you're not succeeding. So, I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.
From the point of view of using events to sort of kick-off readership in a blog or a board, that's a way to sort of build up activity whether you do a series of Webcasts or if you go to a series of conferences and blog about them and invite people in from those conferences and say "Oh, come read my blog, I'm going to write about this, you should comment, you have some interesting thoughts", and if you do that periodically and repetitively, over time that's a good way to bring people in.