How do you decide on how you spend your time when growing your biz?

I recommend spending lots of time reading, listening, watching, and learning about what other people are doing. It will drastically expand the universe of worthwhile options you're aware of for improving your project. That way, even if you're not perfectly optimal in choosing what to do, you can still be confident that your choices are fairly good ones.

Also, have a vision of where you want to go, and develop clear hypotheses for how to get there. It's easy to get sucked into following a little bit of good advice here and there in a hodgepodge fashion, but in my experience it's more impactful to get one or two big things very right, even if that means neglecting some of the tiny details. Find your big things.

There are always too many things to do. You pick one metric (in your case pageviews) and focus on growing that weekly. This metric becomes your compass. If you're doing this full time, try to grow it 7%-10% per week. If part time, around 3-4% would be fine.

So if you have 20k pageviews/month now, you would try to get 23-29k pageviews next month. This sounds a little slow, but if you're growing at 5% week on week, within one year, you'll have 250k pageviews/month.

Don't do anything too complicated. Just focus on hitting your goals next week or next month. This may simply mean writing better articles consistently.

If you fail to hit that target, you do an analysis of what you have done and why it's not working, then focus on the next thing to hit your target.

For more details, you can see this essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

I have a friend who's running a "blog" at 4 million pageviews/month, starting with a few hundred readers on a Facebook page. So it's certainly not impossible. Good luck!

Learn about all your options on how to grow your blog—this varies per blog/niche. List them and order them on what will possibly get you the most roi. Focus on one tactic at a time, say a week.

Try to get a long term vision. With a short term vision you will think there's always something better to do.

Doing something is better than doing nothing. If you're wondering if activity X is better than activity Y, why not try both for a while and track the results?

Great question (thanks for asking it), I can't wait to see more responses!

I find myself doing both extremes: being paralyzed not knowing what to do / where to start, and then being so laser-focused once I do make a decision that I almost have blinders on for other aspects of the business.