It’s never been easier to start a blog. So why is it so hard to have a wildly successful one?
To cobble the bard; “the fault, dear reader, is not in our blogs, but in ourselves.” It’s easy to start a blog. It’s hard to develop a unique voice and remarkable insight (a phrase I learned from Seth Godin’s book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?). Without either, you’re just another voice in the crowd. With both, you become indispensable.
To ask how to gain a unique voice and remarkable insight is missing the boat: If there was a step-by-step formula anyone could follow, the end result would be a crowd neither unique nor remarkable. To have both requires personal thought and experience at the very least, both of which you can neither skip the time and effort on to gain. Whichever your blog’s area of expertise, it’s as Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in the context of creativity:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Or as Benjamin Franklin succinctly summed up: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”