Yes, it can work great, especially with linking in your own blogs only by niche, but can also be risky depending on the current linking situation.
A lot of people say that backlinks aren't as important as before, but that's bs.. Just don't trade links just because the other site has high PR, keep them relevant and SE traffic should be good.
Random tips for a few reasons:
1) Keep your posts per page at 5-15 max...
2) Use alt and title tags for images. title tags for links.
3) Optimize your images, especially if you use height= and width= to reduce size or if the page is loading slow.
4) Submit sitemap (Could be tricky with a blog but doable, PM me for info)
5) Ping and bulk backlinks (bulkping.com mass-ping.com
http://www.imtalk.org/cmps_index.php...site-Submitter)
6) Link to older posts on new posts that are relevant and maybe have a 'popular posts' widget in the sidebar.
7) Use broader terms for categories and use more niche terms for tags but try to have at least 4-5 posts per tag and dont use too many tags for better placement.
8) Use things like Feedburner, Twitter, G+, FB, etc.
9) There's always more that you can learn about kw research, very important.
Then learn how to automate with all of the 'rules' that you know
