Why Many Writers Throw In The Towel After Trying Content Creation

What's your process, and how is it working out for you? Are you enjoying writing and finding success as an online content creator? Or are you writing, struggling to find readers, and not feeling very successful with the endeavor? 

Let us explore the second option. What makes someone a successful content creator, allowing them to cut back on the nine-to-five or even eliminate the usual grind? Why haven't you been able to do the same? 

Online content creators are a dime a dozen, and writing platforms aren't easy to navigate. The problems are plentiful, and the solutions aren't easy. When considering the platforms you use, have you looked at their tone or vibe?

What's the tone of the platform? Platforms for online content creators suffer from the same issues as newspapers and broadcast news. You don't own them. They aren't operating to represent every voice, and they're only going to push those stories that align with them. It's them that create the problem.

Identifying Problems With Content Platforms

• Values and opinions of the CEOs and management. If your tone and voice don't align, you aren't going to get far. That covers politics, activism, criminal justice, societal change, cultural issues, dating, religion, and life. 
• Timeliness. Publications requiring approval before your work goes live don't always keep up with the timeliness of your work. 
• Lack of readers. While some publications will quietly push you, others, and the content platforms they're on, will bury you. 
• AI. AI was meant to assist the human experience, but in a highly competitive world, people attempted to use it too much. 
• Where to publish? If you enjoy writing, you'll dabble in different genres and styles until you find a niche, or until you decide not to. Some with a niche do well, depending on the niche. Others struggle. 
• Life and experiences. People like to read real stories, but if you're not a world traveler, expert, or skilled at something unique, you might not have as much to offer. 
• The subjective side of writing. Writing is an art form, like painting, music, or photography. As such, some platforms have contests that you could enter with the best-written piece and still not win, despite being within the rules. 

In a world with plenty of readers, you find an audience. Finding an audience is the most crucial key to successful content writing. This is why many of the talented content creators I met through VOCAL and MEDIUM are nowhere to be found. Overly subjective contests that not everybody can win have made writing contests less desirable.

It was destined to happen. Any contest that lacks a clear path to winning loses the interest of competitors. The lack of competition makes it less believable. It's akin to the Publishers Clearing House Prize, a prize from a company that filed for bankruptcy this year. Who's still playing that?

Why is it that artistic types are so one-sided? That includes platforms led by artistic types? If your worldview doesn't align with theirs, you're facing a form of censorship. They're not being run by businessmen or women, as evidenced by forever in penny stocks status of a couple of platforms.

Yet, you continue to write, because something in you won't give up on the dream of writing and earning a living doing so. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's up to you, the writer, to figure out how to turn a dead-end proposition into something to be proud of.

 Conclusion

These are the top seven reasons why content writing doesn't work out for everyone who tries. It's not an all-inclusive list. But once you get past these issues, if you have some skill with words and are willing to do the work, you might have better luck.