Be true to yourself

If you are becoming a slave to:

1. Your RSS feed reader stats
2. Your daily Adsense earnings
3. Your PageRank
4. Your Technorati Authority/Real rank/Alexa rank

...think again...
My first rule if blogging is that you should be true to yourself, blog about the topics you want to blog about in your own style without compromising yourself to fit in with what you think is required by all these external pressures.
Why? Well for a start, PR hysteresis will change on a whim and there's nothing you can do about it, and your RSS reader figures will also change on the whim of individual visitors.
If you're trying to please everybody, then you're trying too hard. I maintain that if you continue to deliver good quality content, the rankings and visitors will follow. Naturally, you can help the process along with both on-page and off-page tactics, but unless the content is unique and of sufficient quality, there is little point....
There is good reason to use certain 'voices' and 'characters' to get your views across, but equally you will need to remain true to these characters. If you are not certain what I mean by characters, I will discuss it in a later post.