The #1 Reason Why Authors & Bloggers Fail

Disclaimer: If you aren’t a writer, a blogger, an author, someone who has a business or ministry, just skip today’s post and check out my FAQ page which has been updated recently.

Aside from spiritual and theological questions, which I’m often asked, the most frequent questions I receive are from bloggers and authors who ask me all sorts of questions about the craft of writing.

In this post, I’m going to candidly address what I believe to be the chief problem that bloggers and authors face today. It’s the main reason why so many of them fail at making an impact with their written work.

Let me preface the problem with this remark. There’s not a week that goes by where I don’t see the following:

1. Weekly, I get spammy emails from authors who I don’t know asking me to promote their book on my blog. (Not a wise thing to do.)

2. Weekly, I see authors trying in vain to promote their books on Facebook groups (this is highly ineffective, and many find it annoying).

3. Weekly, I see bloggers who have great content and remarkable writing talent, but their blog design is horrible and they don’t know what they’re doing in terms of getting readers. If they would just invest in learning, these people could make a large impact and even become professional bloggers in time, supplementing their income and gaining thousands of readers.

All of the above is frustrating because there is a solution.

Recently, the renowned Christian media expert Phil Cooke interviewed me about blogging and writing books. Here is one of his questions and my answer. 

Phil Cooke: If you could point out the number one problem that hinders authors from being successful and bloggers from getting a lot of traffic to their blogs, what would it be?

Frank Viola: Simple: Failure to invest in training. I see authors and bloggers investing enormous amounts of time and energy on creating content, but zero on learning how to build a community of readers who will consume and spread what they’ve produced. They don’t want to invest in learning how to do this, so they end up spamming people via email and in Facebook groups, and the result is pretty horrible.

For example, there isn’t a week that goes by where successful bloggers and authors don’t get emails from strangers telling them about their new book or blog, never thinking how their email is coming across. (On that score, here’s an important article on how to write to successful bloggers and popular authors.)

In short, those emails get ignored because their approach is all wrong.

I liken the problem to a baseball hitter who only invests in learning how to hit fastballs, but refuses to invest in learning how to hit curveballs. The result is repeated strikeouts. It’s the same way with authors and bloggers who only specialize in writing their books or blogs, but won’t spend a penny on training for how to get people to actually read what they’ve produced in non-spammy ways that actually work. The result is repeated strikeouts.

It puzzles me because their hard work ends up being wasted, and it doesn’t have to be that way. To change course and see results, authors and bloggers must invest in some training.

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Starting today, The Buzz Seminar Master Course will be available for 7 days. The course has several added presentations beyond the ones give by myself and three other experts in the field. There are presentations by Jeff Goins (best-selling author and professional blogger), Ray Edwards (renowned copywriter), Tor Constantino (renowned publicist and media expert), Jeremy Myers (my go-to-guy for all things blogging), and Greg Daniel (a literary agent and veteran publishing expert).

Plus, the course is now available in four different versions, all ranging in price.

If you’re a writer, author, or blogger — aspiring or actual — and you really want to make an impact, taking your writing work to greater levels, you’ll definitely want this training course.

The Buzz is actually a writing course, a blogging course, a book-writing course, a marketing course, a publicity course, a copywriting course, and a publishing course all rolled into one premium training.

Let me add: if you see someone spamming you and others, do them a favor and send them the link to this post. You’ll be saving them a lot of frustration and failure in the end.

Here’s the link to the course again — the course site has been completely redesigned recently: BuzzSeminar.com