I’ve been making observations for a couple of months about blog growth and the correlation with certain factors. For example, it’s quite obvious that more traffic means more feed subscribers - and this is a main measurement for me on blog growth.

Other factors in blog feed growth include being linked to by someone influential in the field, by certain large blogs, or even by more directories. Getting included in more search engines will definitely peak traffic, as will an increased PageRank with Google.

So, what accounts for those anomalies we see every now and again. This is what I want to know.

For a few days now, three of my blogs have been adding subscribers in the dozens… and I don’t know why. Traffic is on its same steady incline - no unusual peaks. No single article seams to be outweighing any others. No large links have spiked traffic. No new PageRank has come out. And yet I am picking up lots of new readers - which is great. I would just like to know why.

Any ideas? What else do you think could account for large growth figures in RSS subscribers?