How to get me to subscribe to your blog

Each time the Sew Mama Sew giveaway rolls around, I look at and pass by many blogs, subscribe to several new-to-me blogs - and immediately unsubscribe from a few.

#1 on the list for getting me to delete you from my feed reader: putting just a snippet in your feed.  Yes, you may think it will make people come by your blog rather than just reading it in the reader - but that's only if you're fabulous enough to make me want to click through every time.  (If it's a money thing - some rss feeds have ads in them, so that's a possibility.)  Examples: GrosgrainFabulous and My Cozy Little Whimsy Nook.

If you want me to click through, you have to be excellent enough to bring me over from just a snippet (unlikely),  have something that I want to comment about without your requesting comments, or - much more effectively - ask a question at the end.  "What are you doing today" works!  (I'm not clicking through as much these days, reading the RSS feeds on a smartphone while nursing in the middle of the night, but sometimes...)

How do you get me to subscribe?

• Be different - be a man who makes traditional quilts and raises a daughter with his partner in Texas, or a woman with an autistic boy and his two sisters who writes about triumphs and difficulties, or someone who makes a fairy world for herself.  
• Make things I like and want to make (traditional quilts, for example!), or have children a bit older than mine so that I know what to expect (and get ideas for things to make).
• Just have pretty pictures or be bright and sunny and rainbow-filled.
• Even if I don't like your things at all (but even more if I do), good stories never hurt.
• Not too many posts - five a day might be a bit much!
• Be nice.  If you're really nice, I'll even buy things from you :)

And don'ts?

• Don't post one huge fifteen-page post with eighty photos that takes forever to load - break it up!
• Don't be nasty.  Grouchy people, or people who talk overly much about politics (sometimes even if I agree with you), or especially people who say that you'd have to be an idiot to disagree with them (if you think I'm an idiot, clearly you don't want me reading your blog, so I'll leave), well, it's not worth my time.
• I don't care about your blog layout and colors (I use a feed reader), but really weird and hard-to-read fonts will turn me off... and if your blog plays music, I won't stay there long enough to see what you have and decide whether or not to subscribe!

But I'm not overly picky - I have nearly 800 feeds (in several topics, crafts as well as professional, comics, and (guilty secret) Warcraft; and many defunct, because there's no reason to clear it out if it doesn't post anything).  So, if you see a click-through in your stats from google reader, that's likely me!

UPDATE: I've seen several people put a little "this is what I've done lately" mosaic - that's great.  If your next post is out of character for your blog, or you have three things about toy reviews but you're mainly a sewing blog (just saw one of those!), etc., that will get your new visitors to have a better feel for what you're about.  Clever!