An old friend of mine asked me for some advice about how to increase readership for his blog. I was going to write him a long email, but I thought if I put it here other people can chime in as well.
The conventional wisdom about how to make your blog successful is “write great content.” Of course, that’s very self-serving for established bloggers to say, since it implies that they write great content. I think Felix Salmon is more accurate: write a lot of content.
Should you write more, with lower quality, or less, with higher quality? Fortunately, the blogosphere has been around for long enough that we have a simple empirical answer to this question: given the choice, go for quantity over quality. You might not like it — I certainly don’t — but I defy you to name a really good blogger who doesn’t blog frequently. . . .
Mostly, blogging is a lottery on the individual-blog-entry level — and if you want to win the lottery, your best chance of doing so is to maximize the number of lottery tickets you buy.
(Of course, we at The Baseline Scenario don’t follow this rule, but if I had more time I would.) I recommend Felix’s whole post, most of which I agree with. But I’ll add a few thoughts of my own.
The Baseline Scenario 