"What I DID do in the early days is enlist Tweet support. I would occasionally ask people that I was close with to retweet my posts. I tried to mix it up in order to not ask the same people often. I would send out emails with the Tweet text already written so that they just had to cut-and-paste. As my blog started getting authentic traffic I stopped asking for this help."
I do this all the time and I know other entrepreneurs do as well (James over at ThredUp, Phil over at KartMe, and so on). Enlisting Twitter support is like getting a spark for a fire.
When you have a blog, you spend a lot of thankless time brainstorming and writing posts. If you have great content, you need a way to get it out there. If I can ask my close friends for a retweet, why not? It'll help drive traffic, people will see if the post is good, and then ideally users come back for future posts. That's worked so far and now I've (mostly) dropped off asking for this sort of spark.
It's important to find the spark to getting your content in front of users. More importantly, there are lessons from this that apply to selling and marketing. At a startup, you're always looking for a spark since you never really know when something will catch on fire.
