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.