Make people's jobs easier. Remember how Perl became popular? Sysadmins wanted to write scripts, and Perl was better than SH. Then people wanted to make web pages, and Perl plus CGI made that much easier.

Write packages that make people's lives much easier, then publish them. For example, do some research good enough to get into a top journal, use Perl to do it, and release your code. No, that's not easy, but true, lasting success never has been.