We also have to be honest to ourselves about our own limitations. Are we really producing content that's worth reading and worth sharing?

Search the topic you're writing an article about and look at the first page of your favorite search engine. Are your website, your article, your insights and your tips clearly superior to the top results for that topic? Why should your page be listed ahead of all those other pages? What do you provide that they do not?

Here's an analogy to web content: early television. Some of the shows were silly, vapid, shallow and poor production quality by today's standards, and would never get funded today. On the web, by contrast, it costs almost nothing to publish content, so all the amateur work sloshes around side-by-side with expert content. We have more opportunities to get our work published, but that doesn't make us entitled to have our work read. We have to earn eyeballs, just like any other form of published media.

SEO techniques can help us get started, serving as training wheels. It's worthwhile to watch our traffic and learn what questions, concerns, needs and search queries drew traffic to our articles. But SEO or any other techniques cannot make up for lackluster content.

So here's one takeaway lesson: Stop writing articles on things you don't know well or don't care that much about. Who's going to share that? What search engine would link to that?

Instead, concentrate on niches and topics that you never get tired of reading about, things that fascinate or motivate you, things that you care about or are angry about or would truly recommend to a friend. You'll have a better chance of creating content that intrigues others if you write on things that intrigue you.