To understand the fickle nature of blog readers, you must understand their information-soaked lifestyle. The most active blogosphere participants make a daily (or more frequent) circuit of their favored sources by one of three means:

• They visit and read blogs.
• They view blog feeds in newsreaders, looking at each feed separately.They use newsreaders that merge their feeds into one big feed that, when refreshed, shows the most recent posts from all the feeds.

The first option is the most prevalent. Even though feeds are becoming more popular, and I believe they will eventually be used by nearly everyone who reads online, most people at the time of this writing have no idea what they are. The third option, using a specialized newsreader that can merge feeds on command (such as Rojo), is rare indeed.

The point here is about ebbing and flowing readership. When readers take the trouble to visit your site, which consumes more time than receiving a feed of your site in a newsreader, they get discouraged if you haven’t posted any new entries since their last visit. Naturally, after coming up empty a few times, they might stop visiting. I don’t mean to imply that quantity is more important than quality, but a decent blog with few posts will have a smaller readership than a decent blog with many posts.

Volume brings in traffic. Keeping that traffic requires good quality and a steady pace. I know this principle — volume encouraging steady readership — is true from my own experience both as a blogger and as a consumer of blogs. In the latter case, my daily routine is all about slogging through more content than I can possibly absorb. I use two main newsreaders, each containing more than 200 feeds divided into more than a dozen folders. One folder contains the essentials: feeds from blogs and other information sources that I must read every day.

The feeds that make it into the elite group are the ones that I’ve learned, over time, always deliver fresh content. Those feeds also offer highquality content, but the constant flow of entries is essential.