One admirable thing our good GoBlog pal Climb_Ca did the other day was encourage everybody to stop by the Outdoors Pro blog and buck up its author, Mark, A U.S. Navy veteran and current ski/rafting guide who laments his traffic hasn’t been worth squat of late. Mark’s blog is among the cream of the outdoor-blogging crop but I have to admit I’ve become a lapsed reader as well. The guy’s a good writer and photographer and it shows in his posts.

I’m always up for helping out another blogger in need, so here’s what I’d suggest Mark do to keep people hanging around:

1. Fix your RSS feed. This is mandatory — I don’t read blogs without RSS feeds. I can keep up with 50 blogs if their updates show up in my RSS reader, but this has made me too lazy to bother bookmarking blogs and checking for updates. Why should you go to all this hassle of figuring out how to fix your feed? Because all us hardcore bloggers are incorrigible RSS addicts, and our beast requires feeds.

2. Don’t dwell on readership. Blogging is not a popularity contest, it’s a way to create digital evidence of the fact that you existed in this bit of history. Time spent blogging could invariably be better devoted to a more productive task, but once you become a blogger you become something like a painter or musician or pottery maker: you do it because you can’t imagine not doing it.

3. Go with what you know. This is easy because 90 percent of the time it’s what you’re doing already: writing and photographing the work of an outdoors professional. It’s documentary blogging that can’t be found anywhere else because nobody else is living your life and is lucky enough to have the facility with words to document it. Write what you know, photograph what you see, and you can’t go wrong.

4. Avoid what you don’t know.

Your political posts are a major buzz kill: grating to lefties, unoriginal to righties and bewildering to everyone else. I’ve found that it’s best to leave the politics to the professionals and the fanatics. If I had anything interesting or original to say to them, they’d have disovered me ages ago and I’d have my own talk-radio show by now. I tried political blogging after 9/11 like everybody else did but I lost interest when I realized a) I was just saying what other people were saying and b) I didn’t really know what I was talking about, and I lacked the time and motivation to rectify it. If you had a true aptitude for politics, you’d be raking in the big bucks as a campaign consultant or raking in the graft as an elected official. You’ve got a worthwhile trade, you’re doing worthwhile work, and your blog does a worthwhile job of documenting it. That’s enough, really.