There can be various reasons why a reader will unsubscribe from your blog and stop returning. The idea behind any blog is to capture the readers interest and make him/her want to return to read your insightful articles and opinions. I’ve read other opinions and asked some friends in the industry for reasons as to why they stopped reading blogs they once enjoyed and here are some reasons they gave.
Required registration to participate and/or comment. If it’s spam you are worried about, get a decent plugin to avoid spam instead of alienating your readers.
If your blog is highly opinionated, make sure your opinions are interesting. Don’t just state something is great or something sucks – make sure the reader is captured by your explanation as to why.
Not being original. This one was mentioned several times. A blog that copies articles from elsewhere and leaves a sentence or 2 of their own. Readers don’t need to come to you to read stories from other places.
Selling out your blog. Some good blogs have went south due to the almighty dollar. What was once a good blog has turned into nothing but advertising and paid posts about products.
Don’t write all the time about your own blog and it’s success with pagerank or traffic. Readers likely don’t care so long as your contributions are good.
Believe it or not, too much posting. Readers don’t want to come back a day later and find 50 new posts on your blog as they’ll never be able to keep up.
One way to gauge all of this is to monitor your success via sites such as feedburner and technorati. With these sites you can monitor how many subscribers to your feed you have an get an idea when they are subscribing or when they are dropping off.