Hasty articles keep readers away

Respect your written words if you want readers to respect them.

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

This is the 14 edition of The Essence.

Every time you publish a hastily-written article, you’re risking it.

You are risking losing a potential client who might have hired you if he liked what he was reading.

You are risking losing a loyal fan who might have turned to an online stalker after reading superb articles written by you.

You are risking the potential of having some of your articles picked up by editors and syndicated into dominant media sites.

Michael Simmons, the writer who gets 150,000+ views on average per article, wrote:

“Every time you share content online, you’re training your readers to either ignore you or stop what they’re doing and read you.”

Simmons knew the importance of only publishing good stuff. From the get-go, he spent more than 50 hours per article to produce excellent work. This quality-over-quantity approach took him from a nobody writer to a renowned writer with tens of millions of views.

Now I’m not suggesting you should spend 50 or even 25 hours per article. The idea I’m validating here is to treat every piece you write with respect.

If you don’t proofread or barely edit your articles, you’re not respecting your work.

If you barely research, outline, or prepare before you write, you don’t respect your work enough.

If you don’t take enough time to find solid data and evidence to support your arguments, you don’t respect your work enough.

But more importantly, you’re not respecting readers. You’re not respecting their time, intellect, and attention. And I’d bet they feel it. I’ve read hundreds of articles over the last two years as a writer, examining and judging them. Most of the hasty articles I’ve come across barely got any traction. They usually go unnoticed. They get buried among the millions of blog posts published daily from the 500+ million blogs out there on the wild web.

On the contrary, studying 100+ viral articles, I found that they usually are very well researched, written, edited, and overall…