Buy paid reviews on blogs that has higher traffic levels and readers. Those backlinks and traffic should result in more readers for your blog.
good ideas people, thanks. here's a couple of thoughts: PPC traffic - I'm not sure if doing this in the hopes about getting links & people to blog about my site is a great way to go, as I won't be able to increase my traffic much this way. ie I'd only be able to Increase my traffic by 5% or so with $1000 over a few months. articles - my readership is large because of the quality of the articles. Also, they go viral a lot. I'm not sure if i'd want to dilute the quality of my articles with ones written by someone else who can't write to my audience as well as i do... I could probably find someone, but they might be expensive..