Stop by to vote on your post as the weekly best article.

I don’t have to like the blogger. On the other hand, I have stopped reading one blog because the writer was offensive - he makes that 1%. Maybe he was acting like this as a tactic, maybe he was really like that. I don’t know the guy personally and it didn’t work for me - but others liked it.

Why I subscribe: when I feel that I can use the info on a frequent basis.

That’s something I haven’t been doing fast enough in many cases. The promise of valuable content makes me hang on too long, generally, and that just wastes my time. I think I need to be a bit more ‘trigger happy’ with the unsubscribe button.

But the blogs I am happy to stay with always combine some element of learning with an interesting style. The writing doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to engage me and entertain me a little at the same time.

I don’t mind if I don’t agree with a lot of what’s said, either. Having a contrary view can often be very educational and it certainly challenges.

To get a reader you have to give the reader what they want.

That’s certainly true, but the hard part is that every reader wants something slightly different. I think one of the secrets is to have a pretty solid core style and then expand outwards from that a little to include as many wavering visitors as possible.

and because I like the blogger behind the blog!

Unlike Hans, I don’t feel any need to like the blogger since it’s the content and presentation that interests me. I’d go so far as to say there are a couple of blogs I subscribe to where I really don’t like the blogger for all kinds of reasons, but they come up with great content on a regular basis.

So of course I keep reading those blogs.

Does it sound like this blog will deliver us something of value in the future? Current useful content can be bookmarked and searched for, but the value of being alerted to something important while it is brand new is priceless.

I translate many of my pages into different languages to expand my readership, since I translate into languages like Greek, Japanese, Korean and Russian, the search result are obvious in WordPress because the different character sets really catch your eyes.

I have over a dozen RSS feeds that appear in my Google home page, but that is not my firefox homepage, so I read those when I have time. I have a (very) few, like CatchThePosts, that come in my email. I know that I will be interested in what the writer is presenting. I quickly unsubscribe from sites that don’t give enough details.

I have some sites that I don’t subscribe to, but I have a batch file that open all the sites in different tabs.

That is my reverse order list. Google reader because they will probably be interesting. Email because they will be interesting and my batch files because I will go there for work on a special basis.