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For me, the design gives credibility to the content.
Every so often I find a great blog (content wise) with no design flair whatsoever, and I wonder what they were thinking.
Adsense + bad design screams poor quality, as does the Wordpress default theme with the blue box aka "I can't be bothered spending 5 mins changing a theme so my content must be bad".
The content, as previously mentioned, needs to have it's own style. My blogs tend to swear a fair bit, because that's how I carry on in real life. If I think something is sh*t, I'll say so on my blog rather than watering it down for a family audience. This may offend some people, but it strengthens the relationship with my real audience. A blog that attempts to appeal to everybody will usually fail, so it's important to identify who the blog is for and write to that. I mean to say, if you write a blog on web design that everybody can understand, web designers and technical people won't read it because they already know everything you are saying.
You can tell real content from "article directory" content straight away. A good blog has no sales pitch and is brutally honest about whatever it's discussing.
I also like a bit of meat in blog posts. It's really infuriating to go to a site and read a 2 sentence blog post about what someone's cat happens to be doing that day, or a statement of the total obvious. You have to wonder what the point is of these type of posts.
Paid links / posts don't bother me at all, providing they account for only a small portion of the content. I don't get upset reading a paid post (understanding this is how the blogger gets paid for their time), but I need to see at least 90% non-paid content before I can take the blog seriously.
1 post a week minimum is what I like to see, and make it a good sized post with something interesting. Original images go a long way too - in a world where stock photography rules the business sites, it's refreshing to see some original photos in blog posts (even if the photography isn't amazing).
I tend to think less posts are better than "filler" posts.
Another factor is the quality of comments on a blog. Nothing scares me off more than an abandoned blog post chock full of ****** spam. A real sign the owner does not read or care about their blog. If the comments are well moderated and people are posting intelligent adult conversation, this is a big sign of quality.
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