Why Great Writers Aren’t Successful

And why successful writers aren’t always that great at writing.

Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of popular bloggers who, technically speaking, aren’t the best writers? They’ve got huge followings, whether on a platform like Medium or their own independent blog, and people flock to their work to like and comment, but their work isn’t the highest caliber?

Sure, their writing is pretty good — technically passable, not overly verbose, maybe a typo here or there but nothing major. They write about a lot of different things, ranging from broad, popular topics to niche subjects, but the particular topic doesn’t seem to affect their numbers much — they have huge numbers of likes and comments no matter what they write about.

So, you might say to yourself, why aren’t you more popular? Your writing is better quality than that popular person’s stuff, and you write about similar topics. Why can’t you seem to gain any traction?

The simple answer is that the most successful writers aren’t good writers, they’re good marketers. There is a certain amount of luck that goes into getting traction with your writing, but like so many things, you can manufacture some of that luck by playing the game the right way.

Using techniques ranging from search engine optimization (that infamous SEO that everyone talks about) to simply tagging your articles properly can generate loads of traffic. Picking a good title goes a long way towards getting people to click on your article. And of course, you won’t get anywhere without an email list.

The people who are successful at getting views know these tricks and are good at them. The quality of your writing is secondary at best to the effort that goes into your marketing tricks; as long as your writing isn’t terrible and littered with typos, you’ll do fine.

Honestly, writing that is simple and straightforward is generally much better than more complicated writing; if you are writing above a middle-school reading level, you’re losing a ton of your audience. As a grant writer, my goal is to take a complicated, niche program with a lot of unique terminologies and explain it in a way that anyone can understand. The people who read grants aren’t experts; they’re just randos who are on a foundation’s board, and they rarely have any experience in the subjects they read about.

Successful bloggers know this and tailor their writing styles to their audiences. Again, technical skill has very little to do with it, and can actively work against you in some cases — as much as I like using bigger words and lots of em-dashes and semicolons, I also understand that they can alienate some readers. Heck, lots of people will read that last sentence and ask “what’s an em-dash?” That irony is not lost on me.

Another marketing trick is simply publishing regularly. Whether that’s weekly, semi-weekly, or every day, making sure that you are constantly producing content is an important part of getting views and converting those views into revenue.

Again, the quality of your writing doesn’t always matter here — you might be able to land a cushy gig writing a handful of articles a month for an absurd amount of money, but we can’t all be Carrie Bradshaw. The world doesn’t work that way, and sometimes you just need to put something out today so you can keep up with your schedule.

And, of course, sometimes you just get lucky and an algorithm somewhere picks up something you wrote. One of my articles got picked up somewhere and has received over 12k clicks in less than a month. I have no idea why or where it got picked up, but that’s just how it goes sometimes.

Having an email list is another major tactic. Good marketers know how to convert one-time readers into email contacts, who they then convert into recurring readers who buy their other products. Selling an ebook is a way that many successful bloggers keep up their revenue, and they often sell that ebook to their email subscribers.

The logic goes that if you took the time to sign up for a person’s email notifications, you did so for a reason and are more likely to open those emails and click the links within. This can be reinforced by offering a free thing — usually another ebook — as a gift for signing up for the email list, which then encourages people to open those emails and buy other ebooks or courses or whatever.

I should clarify that I am not good at any of this. I have accumulated these tricks over quite a long time of attempting to get my work read widely, but I am not good at them and don’t do them very much if at all. I am a writer first and a marketer…well, definitely not second, and probably not third either. I write to write, and as much as I like having my work read, it will likely never be as popular as someone like Tim Denning.

Therein lies the rub, I think. There are quite a few excellent writers on this platform and others who will never be successful because they are writers, not marketers. Writers who are “successful” are constantly hustling to market their work, create products to sell, send out emails, and of course, write something regularly. There comes a point where the perpetual motion machine picks up some of the slack, but they still have to maintain the machine and produce something regularly to keep it going.

In the words of the immortal meme, ain’t nobody got time for that. At least, I don’t. I have a full-time day job and write these articles for funsies. And, quite frankly, a lot of other people don’t have the time or energy for that either.

Constantly marketing your work on top of regularly producing that work is hard, and lots of people are simply not up for it. I am not any good at it, since I still deal with low self-esteem and think that most of what I produce is garbage not worth the pixels it’s rendered on. Even if I did think highly of my own work, I don’t have the energy to maintain the machine and am not good at doing that kind of stuff anyway.

Not everyone is good at marketing themselves and their work. The funny thing is that there are successful bloggers who are successful because they tell people that “anyone can do it.” Of course, they’re excellent at marketing themselves, so their success comes from selling their method to you, the common folk. The simple fact that no, not anyone can do it is not a barrier to their success; they’re excellent marketers, after all, and as long as they can convince people that it’s possible, they’ll continue to be successful.

So, if your writing isn’t gaining as much traction as you’d like, understand that you will likely have to make a choice. Either you continue writing for fun and just forget about the profit part, or you learn the marketing tricks to become more widely read and follow them to a T. Even if you do, it’s not a guarantee, since not everyone is good at marketing naturally. As I have learned, you can make no mistakes and still lose.

Of course, you could always rely on one of the many mysterious internet algorithms to pick up an article and make it go viral. It could happen.

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