If everyone in your category is writing restaurant reviews as if they’re formal essays, something “unexpected” would be to write comedic restaurant r… - Nicolas Cole

All of my most popular Quora answers followed a similar methodology. 800,000+ views: How to become more confident. 783,000+ views: How to stop being average. 507,000+ views: What it feels like to go from unattractive to attractive. 425,000+ views: A stranger I met once that changed my life forever. 412,000+ views: Why having everything you want won’t make you happy.

Numbers alone tell the story. Inc Magazine averages around 30 million page views per month. Medium, a social writing platform, has somewhere around 30 million users — and Quora is about 10x the size of Medium, with 300 million users. Side by side, my Inc column never once outperformed my exposure on Quora or Medium. A really great month writing for Inc Magazine, I’d bring in 300,000 views. On Medium though, 300,000 views in a month was considered average. And between 2014 and 2018 on Quora, 300,000 views was considered a monumental failure. I consistently averaged over a million. Even still today, my Inc Magazine reports tell me my 409 columns continue to generate around 80,000 views per month, passively. Meanwhile, my content on Medium and Quora together generates between 500,000 and 1,000,000 views per month passively. Publications “seem” big, but in reality, their distribution is rather small.

When people read online, they don’t actually “read.” What they do is skim. Browse. Scroll. They let their eyes gloss over the words, and if something compelling catches their eye in the first two, five, maybe ten seconds (a word, a subhead, a phrase), then they’ll stop skimming and start reading. But you better believe as soon as momentum in the writing starts to slow, they’re gone. They’ll swipe back to their social media feed and be neck deep in Memeville in a millisecond.