I’ve had several blogs in the past that all died out because I didn’t have the time (or couldn’t be bothered) to keep adding to them. If you don’t have a plan for a continued theme, regular posts, plans for when ideas dry out, then it’s a non-starter. Sure, you can maintain it for a long time if it’s just for personal writing, but you’ll only do so if you aren’t chasing popularity.
My mistake in the beginning was being a perfectionist - trying to write the killer post that made me an international blogging superhero or something. And one or two did see a lot of traffic (at cost to me) for a short while, but didn’t create engagement. The time and effort that went into it was just not worth it, and the low frequency of posts (because of the overhead I’d added) was what made people fail to stick around.
What I found was that it didn’t matter about making one awesome post. What mattered was regularity - twice a week without fail.
If I couldn’t think of anything to write about I just looked at recent commits to projects that I followed and painted an obviously-contrived arching theme to the direction of the community. “so you can see that there is a growing frequency of PRs that focus on the build system and testing, rather than core functionality. Is the community entering the get-your-shit together phase?” - post it under the title “Developers are getting their shit together. What does this mean for you?”. Done. Half an hour, easy peasy.
By keeping up the regularity, people were more likely to click. Perhaps it was that they’ve seen the name of the blog a few times and their intrigue has grown. They were also more likely to click onto other articles when I sorted out a decent tagging system, and once they had seen three posts on a single visit their chances of sharing posts, commenting or visiting the RSS feed skyrocketed.
The thing is, this was a long time ago in the 2000s. Things have changed big time, and not in a good way, when it comes to blogs. People don’t subscribe to blogs any more (well, it’s rarer), they subscribe to PEOPLE who sometimes SHARE blog posts they find interesting. If I were to try again (which I won’t - I’d sooner start doing YouTube videos or something), my aim would be to be noticed by the influencers (10k+ followers) in the right community.
That’s my 2c anyway.