Creating and maintaining a blog is easy, you can use Wordpress or Blogger, just to mention the most popular solutions, but getting repeated visitors is another story...  First of all you need to create unique and interesting content, preferably in a regular basis. So be sure to choose a topic you are confortable with. Your posts don't need to be very long, most people prefer to read a good short text.
If you have much to write about a certain subject, why not split it in several parts? Maybe some interesting lists or findings?
Finally the design of your blog should be average at least. Not every blog has a premium template, but if it's plain ugly people may go away without even read what you have to tell...

All done? Now you just have to ping your blog to the most popular places and visitors will start to arrive to your blog. After that some will link to you, if you are good enough, and you are good to go :)