Great content does not guarantee traffic to your blog

But good content is essential for attracting engagement.

I am an amateur writer; not a programmer I don’t know how search engines’ algorithms work.

But I know for sure that good content alone cannot draw traffic. Stories with inferior content can sometimes drive huge traffic but no engagement. I know this based on my own experiences.

I wonder if anybody except the original engineers of search engines knows how algorithms work. People have many different hypotheses about how to attract views.

Every day, I see different new theories of generating traffic. Some writers give us five ways to attract traffic, and some even suggest 25 ways to drive traffic.

To increase traffic is a highly searched key phrase.  All armature bloggers want to know how to boost traffic to their blogs. In this way, writing about drawing traffic attract a  lot of traffic to their blogs.

“How to get traffic?” is an open question similar to “how to be happy” and “how to make money.” There is no definitive answer to those questions.
If you knew the answer, you could overtake Jeff Bezos.

Content does not generate traffic:

We hear a lot about the content these days. Many suggest, only good content attracts traffic; this is a wrong idea. Let me explain why I am convinced that content does not necessarily help to get traffic.

Last year I launched a website. I added great contents to my site. Google Adsense approved my site. Google would not have accepted my site if I did not have good content.

I did not get any visitor to my site. I hired an SEO expert to optimize my site.

You would not believe, I got three visitors in 3 months after so called SEO. I planned to cover the maintenances cost of the site from the earning of Adsense. That did not happen.

Here is the screenshot of the story that is getting about 1K views every day:

Screenshot: details of views

This story has no significant content. I used half an hour to write it. But it has attracted 170 views.
On the other hands, my most researched article has got 2 views. Out of 170 K views, I got only 7 likes.

A couple of months ago I noticed that one of my stories on medium got about 1.5 K views. It was a low-quality story without any research. I deleted that story and rewrote it using many hours of research. I published the modified story. Guess what; I have got 3 views so far.

I have the similar experience from Quora. I have written some well researched high-quality answers there but failed to get many views. But one of my answers has gained over 600 K  views. Even Quora Digest sent the answer to 20 million users. Only 500 people upvoted the answer. The answer was not my best.

Content is essential for the engagement of readers:

The story I have mentioned earlier one story on Medium has got about 170 K views but got only 7 applauses. There has not been any engagement at all because readers did not find any reason to like my story. They did not see anything in the story to highlight.

About the Quora answer, Quora algorithm picked up my answer as a good one and invited 20 million users to read it. So many people read the story but only 500 likes

In both cases, the quality of the content was low. In the first case, nobody has any engagement, and in the second case, readers’ involvement is very low. 
One of my medium stories have got only 5 views, but the interesting thing is, I have got 4 applause out of 5 views because the content of the story was good.

You may come to a situation that some of your great stories remain unseen; this is very unfortunate. I worked for some of my stories but failed to get any view. I did not feel good with the situation and promoted those stories on Facebook. Expenditures did not pay up.

There is no point of drawing tons of traffics if your stories are not good.