Dancing with the Stars is a TV show that pairs up mid-list celebrities with professional ballroom dancers to compete in weekly dance-offs. Three judges give them a score after every dance and that score, combined with viewer voting, determines whether they advance to the following week of competition.

The show require some measure of skill, but you don’t have to be the best dancer to win. In fact, the best dancer rarely wins it all: see this season’s winner Donny Osmond, who was mediocre at best.

As long as you get the viewer votes, you can make it all the way to the end and win it all. Being a good dancer certainly helps, but it’s not absolutely necessary.

Get to the Point Already

Same goes with blogging: you do not have to be a great blogger to make money. And by “great blogger” I mean a good writer, marketer, and communicator.

In the end, what matters is traffic.

What matters is how popular you are.

Hate to say it, but it’s back to the high-school rule of law: being popular is the most important thing there is.

Being popular gets you the visits, the visits get you the readers, and the readers get you potential revenue streams. And that’s where the money is.

When I first started reading blogs about personal finance, I was shocked at how much crap there was out there. People like Robert Kiyosaki were spouting all kinds of nonsense and a lot of bloggers were just plain boring or couldn’t write worth a lick. So I decided I could do better, and that’s why I jumped in—fully expecting that my superior writing skills would make all the difference in the world.

They haven’t.

I have seen my traffic grow, but not nearly as fast as other sites have. I’ve made some money, but nothing close to what some of the mid-level blogs out there make. The secret? They’ve hit upon the magic sauce way before me: they know what to do to become (and stay) popular.

Me? I’m still working on it. If you have any ideas, shoot them my way.

By the way, check out Kiyosaki’s latest and this great post refuting everything he says. Great stuff!