• How do you offer enough content through your feed to encourage subscribers without making your actual site irrelevant?
• If your site pays the bills, how do you monetize your feed without junking it up and turning users off?
• What's the best way to promote and advertise your feed?
• What makes your feed stand out in the often crowded pages of incoming content?

Darren Rowse has created quite a discussion over at ProBlogger centered around the very thing that these questions are designed to address:  retaining readership.  Rowse has posed the question (which was submitted by a reader) and asked what factors lead to readers hitting the "unsubscribe" button on an RSS feed.
 
Several themes seem to be emerging, although the specifics vary a little from person to person.  From my crude analysis of the almost 100 comments already left in response to questions, the top 5 reasons most people cite as reasons for unsubscribing from a feed include:

1. Large gaps in posting
2. Off-topic posting
3. Too many or overly lengthy posts (which I'm guilty of, I admit)
4. Unoriginal content
5. Partial feeds

There are a lot of other reasons being thrown in that are all valid points.  Some people don't like personal information being thrown into a non-personal blog.  Others will unsubscribe if the posts are filled with too much "ego" or ranking.  And still others will drop a feed if the variety of topics aren't varied enough.
 
So it looks like everyone is a little different.  And that's why your subscriber numbers are probably always fluctuating around the same baseline.  Hopefully that baseline is steadily rising.
 
The thing to take from this discussion, though, is that there are a few standards that will kill your feed.  Post consistently, stay on topic, and make your content unique.  Those are really the basics of any website design.  And it would appear that feed basics are roughly the same.
 
Bottom line:  if you create unique, consistent content for your site, your subscriber base will continue to grow.

 

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