Post History

Everything Monica said, and then this: There are, at very least, three components to this.

1. Are your ideas exceptional? Most people's aren't, of course, but some peoples are. No one can tell you how to have exceptional ideas, of course. 

2. Is your expression of these ideas exceptional enough that people outside some inner circle of people who sympathise with your ideas will be able to follow them? This is a writing question, and the answer, generally speaking, is that you have to meet the reader where they are now. The problem with most thinkers is that they have been thinking about their subject so long that they have lost touch with the experience and ideas of ordinary people and simply don't know how to talk to them anymore. There is even a name for this: The Curse of Knowledge. 

3. Are your ideas appealing? Just because an idea is original, or even true, does not mean that it is appealing to people. Very few people are in favor of radical change of anything that touches their lives. They care about things like can I pay my mortgage, can I feed my kids, will my job be there tomorrow. Any idea that involves a radical derangement of the status quo, no matter how rosy a picture it paints of the future state to be achieved, is unappealing if people don't feel confident that they will be able to pay their mortgage and feed their kids and keep their job in the interim. Basically, people like ideas in which they get more stuff without losing any of the stuff they have now.  

Of these, only the second is a writing problem. The only writing advice I think anyone can give is to make sure you are addressing the audience you want to reach in terms they understand on a subject they actually care about. Otherwise, they are going to ignore you, however brilliant your ideas may be. 

I suspect that the number one source of disappointment for bloggers stems from their grossly overestimating how much other people care about the things that they care about. 

I suspect that the vast majority of blogs fall into one of two categories:

1. Blogs about things lots of people care about that are ignored because there are thousands of other blogs on the same subject and theirs is not exceptional enough to stand out. 

2. Blogs about things that very few people care about that very few people read because very few people care about the subject. 

The same, by the way, is true for pretty much every form of communication. 

There are only two ways out of this that I can see:

1. Write exceptionally well about something lots of people care about. 

2. Write something so exceptionally compelling that you induce a lot of people to care about something they did not care about before. 

The first is tough. The second, it should be obvious, is a whole lot tougher.