Hi, canuck. This is Gavin Sheehan -- I'm on David Maister's tech team. I wanted to drop a note to let you know that David actually does offer a newsletter through his website, where he mails out his full length articles to opt-in subscribers. If you're interested, you can sign up for David Maister's newsletter here. (David also offers a free business masterclass podcast series and RSS and email subscription options to his blog.)

But you raise an important point: the newsletter clearly isn't easy enough to find on his site. We're in the middle of revamping how his subscriptions work right now, and making the newsletter more prominent and easier to find is one of the top priorites.

Thank you for the feedback!

I went to the site and read some of the comments regarding how to increase readership.

May I assume you have optimized the site so it comes up fast at Google? When I built our company website I learned a little bit about submitting our url to various search engines, but I didn't research it intensively to see what one had to do to attempt to be the first website that came up. I did use one paid 'submit url' type marketer. But our business doesn't really need high visibility because we're a very small custom yacht manufacturer and most of our clients come to us by word of mouth. Our website, was more of a convenience for existing customers and staying up-to-date with technology than an avenue to attract new customers. However, you do desire to attract more readers, so I would look into optimization for search engines and ensuring wherever there is a free, 'submit url', that you take advantage of it.

If you're interested in generating income for your site, I would seek advice from a marketer who is conversant with techniques to attract paid ad sponsors.

It could be worth your while to contact Blogads Seems like that might be a good place to place an ad for your site? They do appear to have expertise in where to place those ads?

Your newsletter could use an icon somewhere on your site--it's not particularly visible there is a newsletter. I did not spend a lot of time at your site, so it may be it is prominent and I just didn't see it? My reason for not spending more time there has nothing to do with what you put there, just don't have any more time to spend at other sites because of demands on my time.

Salon.com wrote an article marketing for bloggers 101 Sorry, but I just didn't have enough time at my disposal to read it, just typed "Blogger, How to increase readership" at Google and that was the first article that came up. I did have an account at Salon at one time and know they do tend to write very knowledgeable articles.

BTW, if I were a new blogger and trying to attract attention to mine, I wouldn't make my site look like every other blogger, I would contemplate how to make mine as attractive and unique as possible. Originality may attract more readers? Don't really know, but it's worth trying if your readership doesn't increase after you've tried everything else. My tendency would be to do it first. but then I bore easily and find 3 colums with a header or banner at the top is what almost all bloggers do? Could be because the center section is where the most readers are and it does serve the function of not having to scroll across the page. Left and right columns are usually reserved for one thing or another?

Probably most important of all. I highly recommend you have some empirical method of measuring changes that you make to your site. Numbers do not lie. If readership #'s goes up, you're doing something right. If they go down...you need improvement.

Fine tuning empirical measurements on your site would consist of knowing which articles your readers click on. Then establishing why those articles were the most popular? What do they have in common with each other over time? There is software that measures all these things...make sure you have one of the best installed on your site--most are free. Depending on how much you want to increase your readership, it may be worth your while to get one that isn't free. During my lifetime, I have found, you get what you pay for. :-) Always test the effect of changes of what you believe with numbers rather than assuming with intuition or some other hocus pocus non-measurement.

Just one more little biddy thing. I'm not in favour of personal photographs of whoever is the founder of the site. Much better to develop a logo that expresses what the site is about and that readers will come to associate with your site rather than subjecting them to meaningless pics of people who they don't know and probably never will. That will take some diplomacy to achieve at your site.

Most of all for your site, think 'visual' rather than written!

Thanks a lot for all the great suggestions. I'm sharing them with the rest of our team and appreciate you taking the time to write all this up!

Best
Gavin