An Equation for a Successful Blog (And Life)

By Stefan Auvache

If you wanted to start a blog today and googled “how to start a blog,” you would find step-by-step tutorials and pro tips: design a website, optimize for SEO, promote your content on social media, pick a niche, etc.

Seth Godin does almost none of that.

No social media. No SEO strategy. No concern for word count or analytics. His focus is simple: write something helpful and post it every day.

He’s done this since 2002—thousands of posts on marketing, leadership, personal development, and whatever else is on his mind. Millions of people read his work. And if you search “blog” on Google, his site shows up on the first page.

All without following the advice of other “successful” bloggers.

Here’s the thing: people often succeed in spite of what they do, not because of it. Someone could build a thriving business or sell a million books and credit a dozen different tactics. But usually, only a few of those things actually mattered.

Take the typical formula you’ll see online:

Successful blog = good content + SEO + social media + consistent posting

Every variable to the right of the equals sign is something you can control. You can write helpful articles. You can improve Google rankings. You can market your work.

But the formula is incomplete—it doesn’t show what matters most. What if the equation had multipliers attached to each variable? It would look something like this:

Successful blog = (good content x 2) + (SEO x 1) + (social media x 1) + (consistent posting x 1)

In this version of the equation, writing good content has twice the impact of any other variable. If that is indeed the case, then, if you want a successful blog, you should put more effort into the articles you write than into marketing them.

What makes Seth Godin so successful is the simplicity of his equation for success. He writes every day and posts every day. That’s it. No wasted effort on maintaining social media accounts, focusing on SEO keywords, or optimizing email funnels.

His habit builds his ability as a writer, which makes the posts more engaging over time. The consistency and volume of his posts help his audience grow naturally. More articles mean more entry-points to the blog, which means more people see and share his articles. SEO and social media take care of themselves.

Success in Spite of Action

Like I said, people often succeed in spite of what they do—not because of it.

When someone breaks through—launches a hit product, builds a massive following, loses 30 pounds—they tend to bundle all their efforts together into one big lump as if everything they did played an equal role in their triumph. But not all actions contribute equally to success. Some matter a lot, while others are trivial or even counterproductive.

Take weight loss, for example. One person swears by a 6-meal-a-day plan. Someone else practices intermittent fasting. A third cuts out sugar entirely. But in the end, the real driver is usually calorie restriction. The rest? Success stories are often built on a small handful of effective habits—buried under a pile of unnecessary ones.

This is the 80/20 rule in action. A few inputs generate most of the results. Maybe 20% of your actions create 80% of your outcomes. But because everything was done at once—the diet, the workouts, the supplements, the cold plunges—you lose sight of which variables actually contributed to your success.

Pareto distributions show up everywhere: 20% of customers drive 80% of revenue. 20% of bugs cause 80% of software crashes. 20% of blog posts bring in 80% of the traffic. The pattern isn’t always exactly 80/20, but the idea holds—returns are rarely evenly distributed.

Experiment, Eliminate

Understanding this can change how you and I work.

Instead of doing more, try to do less—strategically.

To figure out which variables are the most impactful in your equation, experiment. Try a few isolated things and figure out what is actually working. Instead of going on a strict, detailed diet or spending hours optimizing your website for SEO, try tracking calories and monitoring your weight for a few weeks—or writing one solid article and sharing it in a few places. You’ll learn fast what works and what doesn’t.

The goal isn’t to do everything—it’s to figure out what’s working, do more of that, and get rid of the excess. If you don’t take time to experiment, you’ll end up lumping all of your efforts together into one, time-consuming, inefficient formula for success.

What are you trying to accomplish?

What variables matter most in your equation?

What things might everyone else be doing that you don’t actually need to do?

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