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Must you be a Good Writer to be a Successful Blogger?


It wasn’t until very recently that a good friend asked me this question – Do you have to be a good writer to be a successful blogger? He knows I’m a writer by profession and he wondered why I did not have my own personal blog. The general assumption was that if you’re able to write well, you must have an online showcase through which you can reach out to let more people know of your ability. However, I don’t subscribe to this theory – I believe that a blog is something personal and that you don’t really have to have one unless you really want to make parts of your life public knowledge.

Coming back to the initial question, is the reverse true? If you do own a blog, how good a writer do you have to be to make a success of it? From what I’ve seen so far, it’s not really great writing that makes a blog a success. Rather, going by Internet standards, if you own a blog and want it to succeed, you need to:
  • Provide quality information
  • Update it regularly
  • Respond to reader comments
  • Incorporate feedback to make your site better
  • Adopt SEO techniques
  • Ensure that your blog is visible all over the web
So you see, good writing does not even feature on the list. You must know how to market your blog more than focusing on excellent writing if you want to achieve a large number of hits and make your site popular. However, there are times when the ability to write does come in handy when you’re a blog owner, and they are:
  • When your site is focused mostly on providing information – you don’t want to own a blog with typos and spelling and grammatical errors.
  • When your blog is basically an advertisement to market your writing skills.
  • When you want to project a more formal look for your site; it pays to get someone to check what you’ve written before you put it up in such cases.
  • When your site has become popular and you need to sustain reader interest – good writing becomes the differentiating factor that helps you stay ahead of the competition.
In general, once you decide to start a blog, it’s best to brush up on your writing skills. It’s not just enough to provide information and be entertaining; when you know how best to serve the information through good writing, that’s when you add that extra edge to your success quotient.