Readership, Blogging, Trends and statistically smoothing the samplings...
I'm pretty sure I've seen a couple of messages go by where the author's of various blogs were worried about a decline in readership. There was one yesterday that particularly caught my eye because the immediate response from the author was, "What are we doing wrong?". That means at least some authors are worried about their own readership, while others primarily care about having a repository for their own information. I think you really need to draw a balance between the two in order to fight general community ignorance of whatever feature or item you are a professional for.
One thing to note is that there are some definite trends. During the winter when you release a new posting, you generally have 800 aggregator reads in the first day. Not sure how the .Text system keeps these sane, perhaps with unique IP counts or something, but not only is this an inaccurate number (5000 different people from a shared portal IP for instance could be getting your RSS) it is a very dependent number.
Your agg views are primarily linked to the time you are on the main feed list. Very few people actually read your feed directly. This is common. I know I have about 100 direct feed viewers becuase every once in a while I create a posting that doesn't show up on the main feed just so I can get that information. The more active the main feed list is, the less time there will be for your posting to get mass impressions. There really isn't a function for maximizing your time in the feed list and impressions. Late at night, you'll stick around longer, but you'll only get views from people that leave their aggregators on. Not to mention by the time the morning crew starts you'll be further down in the feed list. Releasing in the morning works pretty well, or before lunch. But since everyone knows this now, you get kicked off the list pretty quickly. Releasing after the work-day, and yes you need to take into account the east-coast, often costs you a hundred or so views as well.
Notice I mentioned you get 800 during the winter. Well, people are on vacation during the summer. People are also less likely to be diligent about using their aggregator software when the sun is shining. Strangely enough, over the past month the aggregation has been around 600 for my blog, while in the past week it has shot right back up to 800. Can you maybe blame something on the rain and people being inside more?
Use some statistics to put your mind at ease. It doesn't appear that there is any decline in the readership and statistically we are still on the rise. Readers are always going to be very explicit in what they are looking for. Don't expect all of your articles to be a hit and have thousands of readers, that just won't happen. Just because you are geeked out on some new technology doesn't mean everyone else is. My math installments of late are a perfect example where I planned for my target audience to be about 20% of the people that might read my blog. My game postings are another great example where only a fraction of the readers will have an in-depth interest and you can't honestly say that everyone wants to add new schemas to VS or write custom exchange mailbox clients. At least one other geek is reading your stuff, believe me.
That said, blogging isn't about the immediate return. It could be I guess if you got sponsored and paid to blog. It appears that some people do have this sort of associated stigma where each article tends to have direct pay-off for them in some way or another. These are the same people that have similar success in other mediums. I've always been curious how many of the MSDN writers continuously get called back to write more sub-par articles (I said some man, others are actually pretty good) but it's their networking and they use the same charisma and techniques with their blogging. You should make sure to draw a balance between blogging for yourself (things you find interesting and get an immediate return from), blogging for your readers (targeted and categorized to the audience that wil ACTUALLY be interested), and simply keeping your blog as a reference material where you can send people that ask questions. This last one is where the blog really pays off. I find that I've already answered 20-30% of the questions that people might ask me somewhere on my blog and sending them to a location with a coherent article rather than giving them impromptu explanation that may be untested, incomplete garbage.