34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog: Darren had asked the question, Why do readers unsubscribe from your blog’s feed? and he tabulated the answers in the comments. Much of the answers are unsurprising but the top two reasons are too many posts and too few posts respectively. So the answer there might be to post just enough entries to keep people coming back and just few enough to keep from overwhelming them. I have found proof of that hypothesis in that the daily updates of plugins and themes on weblogtoolscollection.com works best in single consolidated posts. Other important factors included off topic posts, partial feeds and finally good content. I love Scoble’s comment on that post. There is a lot to be said for “do what you love, put stuff up you’d love to read, and the rest will fall into place.”
I agree totally with the too many posts. Thats some of the reasons I either don’t read the feeds completely, or just knock it off my list.
Too few posts is self-explanatory and I guess it’s the same with the too many posts bit (although if the content’s good, it’s better to have more than less IMHO). The question is though, how much is “just enough” ? A post – a day? 2 days ? 3 ? Week ?
The first two were no-brainers, but the third one surprised me. I’d rather get a gist of a post and then choose if I want to read it, rather than getting the full meal deal in my reader. And this brings up an interesting idea: what if WordPress offered two feeds, one with the full content, and one with excerpts? Perhaps a plugin could do that.
I take the first 10 ten reason and write my comments in a posting. Interesting discussion with german bloggers followed.
Great comment by Scoble.
And great work by Darren putting this together. I can’t wait to see what his guest bloggers say while he’s away.
I know for myself someone who posts daily is enough to overwhelm me. I prefer posts to be spaced out every other day or so.
note about consolidating the plugin and theme releases into daily posts.
i used to read about plugins that sounded interesting when they showed up in my wordpress dashboard “other wordpress news” section. now that it just says “plugins for X day” i don’t even bother clicking anymore.
you might be losing more traffic than you think. having details in the title can be important
Interesting points. Our website is only 2 weeks old….how many days to post was an ongoing discussion. At this point, we are 2 days a week with a reply to the other’s opinion. I’ll be back for more tips!