Aaron Swartz is an excellent software developer (co-founder of reddit), a creative and interesting writer, and a successful blogger, judging by number of comments. I asked him what makes a blog successful. Three things, he said:
1. Persistence. Readership builds over time.
2. Frequency. The more often, the better. It is pure operant conditioning (although Aaron, a fan of anti-behaviorist Alfie Kohn, did not use that term): When people check your blog and find new content they are rewarded, and keep checking. If they check and find nothing new, they stop checking. Although Aaron uses an aggregator (which does the checking), only about 15% of blog readers do so, he said. (I use Sage, a Firefox add-on.) Aaron posts every day or so.
3. A distinct voice. When people visit your blog they should know what to expect. When he started he blogged about all sorts of things but has become more consistent from one entry to the next.
Part 1 (Marginal Revolution co-author Tyler Cowan’s view) is here, with comments here.
This January 2005 Pew study says that 27% of Internet readers say they use blogs but only 5% of them say they use RSS readers.