Why your writing isn’t getting any views

We’ve all been there. You pour your heart and soul into a piece for hours on end, you edit it thoroughly and relentlessly, you steady your finger over that “publish” button, and then… nothing.

It sucks, doesn’t it? Makes you wonder if you were really meant for this whole “writing” thing. Maybe dad was right and you would’ve been better off taking that taste tester job at Raytheon.

Or maybe you just need a little course correction from a bona fide literary demigod. Follow my tips and you’ll be raking in suckers like the best of ’em. Here are the reasons your writing isn’t getting clicks:

Your writing isn’t interesting

Sorry, but we have to rip this band-aid off right away. If what you’re writing isn’t interesting, no one’s gonna want to read it. Ten pages on Ottoman history? Boring. A personal piece on how your family was impacted by the death of a loved one? I’m falling asleep. Try something with more mainstream appeal like “how I earned $75,000 in a month by dropshipping penis pumps on Etsy” or “6 habits that helped me eliminate my emotions”.

Your writing isn’t good

Yep. This is also a possibility. Have you ever read something and thought “this isn’t very good”? Have you ever considered that other people might think that about your work? It’s more likely than you think. Here’s a tip I give all of my students (I teach English composition at UC-Berkeley on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and at Cambridge on Tuesdays and Thursdays): stop trying to write in your own voice. The greats are great for a reason: they wrote in great voices. Toss out everything you know about writing and read Medium’s front page until your eyes bleed. When you know the Top 15 mistakes you’re making with women by heart, you’ll know you’re ready.

Your writing is bad

Alright, this one’s the elephant in the room. You might just be a bad writer. So what do you do if that’s the case? Stop writing? Learn to write better? Neither one of these strategies will get you to a place of making $30,000 a week in just 3 months. What will? Start lying. Make bold claims. Say you found an essential oil that cures cancer. Pretend you’re a marriage expert and you alone can prevent all divorces. What are you afraid of? No one’s gonna vet you. They don’t know you. Who’s to say you don’t have an advanced degree in some complicated field? I lied about teaching at Berkeley (I teach Poli Sci at Stanford) and you believed that shit, didn’t you?

Your writing sucks

Well, we all saw this coming. Maybe you don’t know how to write. Maybe you never quite managed to nail the little hieroglyphics that go together to make the squiggly lines we call “sentences”, or maybe you never found time to work out how to use a keyboard. Listen, that’s fine too. I’ve got you. First things first: have your niece or nephew Google the topic you want to write about. Have ’em scroll like halfway down the page and then tell ’em to copy and paste that whole article into Medium. Change the title up a little bit (or don’t — their SEO wizards know more than you do. They got their shit on Google) and hit publish. What? You think you’re gonna get in trouble? Cry for me, why don’t you. No one’s gonna sue you. Content farms are working their penslaves to the bone trying to outrun the eventual onslaught of ChatGPT. When you’re pumping out ten listicles a day, you can’t remember what you wrote last Monday. Just take it. It’s yours now.

You don’t know your audience

“What having a child with a rare disease taught me”. “The man who brought electricity to China”. “Thoughts on happiness”. You know what these titles have in common? They’re not fucking interesting, and no one wants to click on them. You know what is interesting? “How to Get Rich with Passive Income”. “5 Tricks to Get Rich with Passive Income”. “How I made $25 million in passive income by the time I started 6th grade”. Holy shit, I clicked on every one of those instinctively and they’re not even real. Not yet. But they could be. You see what I’m saying? Stop writing to no one. Start writing for zombies.

Your writing isn’t user friendly

Deconstruct everything you know about “paragraphs”. If I can’t read your article in second-long segments while TikTok loads, I’m not going to read it at all. Here’s my rule of thumb: write a piece the way your brokie English teacher taught you. Then, cross out two thirds of it. Take what’s left and separate it at random into headings, subheadings, bullet points, and quotes. Attribute the quotes to anyone, it doesn’t matter. I gave Robert E. Lee credit for my theory of real estate and no one noticed. Don’t worry if the resulting mishmash of disorganized text doesn’t make sense. The lack of continuity will make you look smart. All your reader is looking for is a sentence that reinforces their already-held views. Anything else is padding.

Your writing is dookie

You can’t write, dude. I don’t know how many ways you’re going to make me say it. I make $700 an hour teaching 21-year-olds the 420 things I wish I knew when I was 69. I quit my job as a professional panhandler last year and started a copywriting business where I make $45,000 a week in passive income. I used five truths to cure all my mental health problems and now I’m a keto god. You can’t touch me. You can’t write like me. Stop trying.

The algorithm emphasizes attention-grabbing bullshit written by comfortable and confident liars who don’t know what they’re talking about. Your competition isn’t other story writers, it’s mythological tricksters who train day and night and won’t rest until they’ve suckered every last human into clicking on their link only to learn nothing. What follows is an uncomfortable pseudo-MLM environment where a few god tier liars at the top rake in tons of cash by drip-feeding hope to their legions of sycophants who want nothing more than to fool people as well as their penfluencer progenitors. It’s not that your writing is bad, it’s not that it’s hopeless. It’s that you’ve entered yourself in a game with two different rulebooks. Ask yourself what it means to watch numbers go up; ask yourself if there’s value in knowing you entrapped some poor hapless child with your unresearched article about the 25 ways to make your penis go titan mode in the bedroom. If your focus is views and views alone, maybe you’re starting off on the wrong foot.

It’s probably not this one.