Do You Need to Be a Popular Blogger to Succeed? |

Ryan Biddulph August 19, 2025 blogging tips 🕑 5 minutes read

Bath England

Social media messes with your mind.

I am not immune from this phenomena.

Earlier today I scanned a few of the mega popular X handles that I currently follow. People heavily engage most of these profiles. Comments fly in left and right. Shares skyrocket. Likes jump into the stratosphere.

Sometimes I think to myself: “Wouldn’t it be nice to generate that level of heady engagement and to be super popular like these social media leaders?”

Making matters trickier, users bombard bloggers with promises to increase follower counts fast.

What is a follower? Humans who tap buttons on social media become followers. What does tapping a button do to your blogging bottom line? Nothing. Few if any who tap a follow button automatically trusts you to the point of being a:

loyal blog reader
customer
client
referral traffic builder
referral business builder

Followers are casual, typically. Loyal fans do at times follow you on social after the fact. Yet these folks seem rare.

Business builders are not casual. Business builders trust your brand based on content.

No blogger needs to be popular.

Nor do you need to generate sky high engagement rates.

Both are myths that lead to massive blogging mistakes.

Chasing vanity metrics delays your blogging success.

What happens if you try to get a ton of followers on social media? You lose sight of your goal: driving highly organic traffic to and through your blog. Building blogging credibility by publishing long form content involves honing a different skill set than increasing your follower count. Anyone can easily engage in manipulative hacks to get followers. Social media threads litter the main stream daily with this largely meaningless goal.

Investing 3 hours to:

research
write
edit
publish

a long form blog post is a genuine skill. No one does that easily. Hence the lack of professional bloggers versus the decent chunk of social media users with large follower counts.

Anyone can manipulate a system to increase what does not really matter.

Few patiently practice to cultivate truly helpful skills.

Do What Moves the Needle

Do what moves the needle versus giving yourself a pat on the blogging back.

Publish targeted content to migrate highly interested people to your blog.

Send ’em home.

My only social media goal is to send users to Blogging From Paradise Dot Com.

I do this not by engaging in pointless hacks. I create helpful tips for bloggers.

Some find the tips. A few trust the tips. A few head on over to my blog.

Move the needle by giving all attention to needle-moving activities.

Pro bloggers:

drive organic traffic
increase blogging income

Do what drives organic traffic and increases blogging income.

Look past being popular.

Stop chasing sky high engagement rates.

The right content sends the right people to your blog.

Hold that concept in mind.

Being Popular

Being popular means that a decent chunk of folks seem to be aware of you. Does that benefit you? Does being noticed put money in your pocket? Not really.

Being popular is good for the ego. Perhaps it feels cool to be noticed. But being noticed does not earn credibility. Being noticed does not gain trust. Being credible drives quality blog traffic and blogging income.

Move the goal. Stop chasing popularity. Start creating targeted content to earn credibility.

I accrued a fairly large X following as the world judges it.

Yet few engage my content.

A tiny percentage of followers migrate to my blog.

I appear to be popular on X per my follower count.

But my content makes the difference.

Readers come here based on the content I publish over there not because 48,000 users follow me on the platform.

Sear this idea onto your brain box.

Trusting my experience saves you many headaches.

Generating Heavy Engagement

I know; you may believe that boosting engagement to epic levels is the only way to make money through blogging.

Increasing engagement does not hurt. At the end of the day, bloggers need some engagement to thrive. Humans who interact with your content prosper you in some way, shape or form.

But dizzying engagement rates are not required to build a successful blogging business.

Look past the massive engagement spied via social media main streams. Some X users generated hundreds to thousands of:

likes
shares
comments

for specific posts.

What does this mean?

Thousands of X users engage the content on the platform known as X.

How does this help individuals who run blogs?

Perhaps a few users migrate from X and Facebook to their blogs. But this is not guaranteed. Never mind how the lion’s share of X users remain on X versus leap frogging to your blog.

I am not in the X business.

I am in the Blogging From Paradise Dot Com business.

Publish Targeted Content on Social Media

Create targeted content on social media for your ideal reader.

For a blogging tips bloggers like myself, this means publishing blogging tips consistently to social media.

Users become familiar with my blogging tips served up through these channels. Some perceive me to be a blogging tips guy. My blogging tips pop up prominently in front of prying eyes. Bloggers who crave tips come across my content on social media. Some click through to my blog.

Being popular or generating sick engagement numbers had nothing to do with this process.

What did?

I published targeted content consistently to slowly drive organic traffic from social media to my blog.

Send Them Home

I sat down to write this post at 10:20 PM.

Why?

I want to send bloggers to my tidy home: Blogging From Paradise Dot Com.

All roads lead to Rome. Funnel everything back to your blog.

Stock your blog with detailed content. Target everything for your specific reader. Solve their problems. Serve their needs. Inspire them. Guide them. Be their cheer leader.