Felix Salmon answers some questions from other bloggers (and blog readers) about how to run a (reasonably) successful blog. What’s the secret to attract more than a couple of hundred readers every day, they wonder? Salmon’s answer:

As always, there’s a trade-off between quantity and quality. Should you write more, with lower quality, or less, with higher quality? Fortunately, the blogosphere has been around for long enough that we have a simple empirical answer to this question: given the choice, go for quantity over quality. You might not like it — I certainly don’t — but I defy you to name a really good blogger who doesn’t blog frequently.

Often bloggers are the worst judges of their own work; I can give you hundreds of personal examples of blog entries I thought were really good which disappeared all but unnoticed, and of blog entries I thought were tossed-off throwaways which got enormous traction and distribution. Mostly, blogging is a lottery on the individual-blog-entry level — and if you want to win the lottery, your best chance of doing so is to maximize the number of lottery tickets you buy.

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen’s Will agrees, and adds:

I think this is basically correct, although I tend to enjoy authors who put out a smaller number of longer posts. So how do you solve the mystery of appealing to a voracious blog readership while producing quality stuff? Without seeming too self-satisfied, I submit that the best answer is through a group blog, which gives individual authors plenty of time to write thoughtful entries while maintaining a steady stream of opinion and commentary.

And, boringly, I agree with both men. Quantity is more important than quality, at least in the short run. And the best way to produce many posts a day is by surrounding yourself by a group of like-minded individuals who love to write.

Having said that, publishing a whole lot of posts day in, day out isn’t even almost the ’secret’ of becoming a second-tier blog (such as PoliGazette; the first-tier blogs have several tens of thousands of readers every day, at least), let alone of becoming a first-tier one. If you really want to become big, you have to have both many and good posts. You can get, say, 2,000 readers a day by simply publishing post after post, but you’ll have a terrible hard time attracting more than that, if the quality of your posts is low.

So you need a group blog with good authors. People who can write well. Who know what they are talking about. Who have an eye for important news.

Let’s say you, the reader, do the above. Will that suffice? Nope. There’s much more to it than that as well. You have to make sure your new blog has a good google rank. You also need many good friends in the blogosphere, for without links, a blog dies. Every now and then, you will have to publish something no one else has.

And if you do that then, well, then you’ll have thousands of readers every day, and you’ll earn a few bucks extra from advertisers. On top of that, you will have created a name for yourself – you’ll be asked by others to contribute to their sites, readers and other, especially other second-tier and quite some first-tier bloggers, will know your name and link to you every now and then – which is extremely satisfying for those among us with an ego (that means every single blogger I have ever known) and for those who want to write op-eds / columns for newspapers every now and then, and who’d like to appear on television every now and then. If you succeed in hanging on to your second-tier status, you’ll be noticed and contacted by old media. Which is nice, because it allows you to brag about it to your partner, friends, family members and relatives.

But then. Well, what then? Is that the end? Is that all? Of course not. Not if  you’re ambitious, that is.

And trust me, once you get there, you want to grow more (I know, for the above is where PG is at). How to proceed from there? Since I do not speak from personal experience – I’ve written for such blogs, written for big newspapers, appeared on TV, etc. but PG itself (my brain child) isn’t there yet – I can only humbly guess. I’ve spoken to a few successful bloggers and new media entrepreneurs, and the key to growing from this point onwards is by turning oneself from a blog into a new media organization. There are enough ‘big blogs’ out there. Political websites with real potential are those who offer readers an opportunity to join the debate, who produce high quality (news) videos, who report news regularly that’s not featured anywhere else, and who learn to use the Internet to the fullest. Web 2.0, mixed with political reporting, basically.

And that takes a whole lot of time, passion, determination and faith.

Even if you do all the above, even if you play by all the rules, you will not reach the top, I believe, unless you have a clear vision. What do you represent, where do you want to be, what makes you different from everyone else? Why should people read your website?

I’m determined to turn PG into one of the biggest, baddest, and most innovate members of the new media and, I’m happy to report, the rest of the PoliGazette crew are with me. Sadly, we’re not even almost there yet. We can get there, I believe, but it will take years, not months, and tens of thousands of dollars, not a few hundred.