We recently had some good discussion here about the fact that irregular blog posting doesn't seem to be the reader turn off that many assume it to be or promote it as. I hope that we can follow this with some discussion of what does turn readers away. For me, it is usually the writing. I don't just mean bad writing, but writing that in some way makes me feel unwelcome or unwanted.

Lindsay Marshall, over at Bifurcated Rivets posted what is quite possibly the best "I'm Going On Vacation" blog message ever - Shhhhhhhhhh

This is the first blog I read BTW - I've been reading it on and off since close to the beginning. (I find that it's more fun to read a bunch of it in one swoop than keep up with it throughout the day.)

This isn't a post about why I haven't written anything here for almost three weeks, because I'm sure no one wants to read about the mundane chores and tasks that have been filling my time and sucking the creativity from my mind. I'm not the only blogger who sometimes has nothing to say, or no time to say it. I recently found tratx's Blogging Without Obligation concept during my wanderings through the blogosphere, and it got me thinking about how frequency of posting affects the blogs I read and what I think of them and their writers. I know that common knowledge says that to succeed as a blogger (particularly a for-profit blogger), you need to post regularly, preferably daily. I think there is some truth in this - I'm much more likely to go look at any given site (and by extension click through on its ads and affiliate or purchase links) if I know there is new and interesting content there.

Author and blogger Karen Shanley has a great post called Five Ways to Set Up Your Blog To Chase Readers Away. It's well worth reading, and has given me some ideas to think about on my various blogs.

I'm a recent convert to using an RSS reader rather than just regularly hitting my favorite blogs and sites. Part of what tipped the balance for me is the increasing use of feeds by non-blog sites. When I had a semi-regular schedule of sites I was checking for updates, it didn't make a lot of sense to me to handle blogs differently. Now most of my favorite regularly updated sites have feeds and I'm much happier using a reader.

Although The Blog Challenge claims to be a 10 day program, in fact, it calls for 20 days of work, since on day seven you start a fourteen day process of posting comments on related blogs. As a result, I felt like the three week mark is a better time to write a summary than the end of the "ten days" of the Challenge.

So, does the Challenge live up to it's promises? NO. There were three areas where the Challenge didn't live up to it's promises – Profitability, Ease Of Use, and Availability of Assistance.

Day 10 – Saturday

Today's task was to add a bunch of icons for RSS/ATOM subscriptions via different feed readers. However, there is now a standardized feed icon, so there is no need to use all of them and it seems like the word subscribe is better understood by the web novices I know than any icon, including the icon specific to whatever reader they use.

Day 9 – Friday

I did the 3 postings to niche-related blogs that I missed yesterday and then another 3 for today. This took me 3 hours. Much of this time was actually setting myself so I could post to AOL AIMpages blogs and have my blog linked to my comments and show up in my profile.

Day 8 Thursday

Most days the Challenge instructions start with an interesting and related quote. Like many people, I collect quotes that I find inspirational, thought provoking, or humorous. The Challenge's quotes are not attributed, and at first I assumed that they were original to the author.

Day 7 – Wednesday

Well, apparently yesterday's work paid off, at least in clicks, because when I looked at my Amazing Counters web counter, I'd gotten as many hits since yesterday's forum postings as I had since I started my blog. Amazing Counters provides a free counter in exchange for showing one product ad on your site. My product ad was for an Overstock.com coupon site – not a good match for a site on dog body language. So while I was in the Amazing Counters site, I poked around and discovered that I can change my advertiser to one that matches my site content, so I did.

Tuesday – Day 6

Day six consists of writing another posting based on a news article and then signing up for a bunch of forums on related topics and posting a teaser to try to get people to reply so you can then refer them to your blog. I couldn't really find any interesting news articles related to my topic. However, since my blog subject is dog body language and Pico was exhibiting a bunch of pain and stress signals from her surgery yesterday (she had a lump and moles removed), I decided to get out my video camera and get some examples and write about that. I'm actually really happy with the result – both the video I got and the way I integrated it into my blog post.