When you’re famous, you can get away with breaking the rules.

I’ve read a fair bit about “how to blog” recently—those posts by internet marketers who hand out basic advice that most people with half a braincell can come up with instinctively. Then I thought about the blogs I actually enjoy reading, and I realized that the bloggers I follow pretty much ignore all the so-called rules.

Take Seth Godin, for example: Seth’s Blog
He’s in the marketing niche himself, but his blog completely disregards the most common advice like:

• Use descriptive headline formulas like “How to…,” “I made $5,117.63 in 4 weeks—here’s how,” or “7 tricks experts recommend (number 6 will surprise you).”
• Write long posts of 2,000+ words.
• Publish one “authority post” a week instead of short daily opinion pieces.
• Optimize everything for SEO.
• Focus on specific long-tail keywords.
• …and so on.

Seth Godin does none of that. In fact, he does the opposite: he writes every day, his posts are usually short, his headlines are often cryptic until you read the article, and there’s little evidence of SEO or keyword-specific writing anywhere.

Of course, he has a huge reputation and a loyal following built over decades of hard work. He can afford to do it “the wrong way”.

But here’s the question I keep coming back to: if he’s supposedly doing it wrong, why do I prefer reading his posts over the latest 2,000-word “authority” article from some self-proclaimed SEO expert?

Almost all the bloggers I read write primarily because they want to. Sure, they’ll cover trending topics when they’re relevant, but it never feels like they’re chasing keywords or thinking about covering niches. Their writing comes across as genuine—like they simply want to share an idea or opinion.

That kind of writing may not win over Google, but it wins over readers like me.

So shouldn’t I write the same way?

In the end, the reader is always the judge. But I’m fairly certain of this: I could happily keep writing for decades in Seth Godin’s style, while I’d probably burn out and lose interest in less than a year trying to follow the advice of the so-called blogging experts.