In an interview with Mary Jaksch, Jon Morrow, Associate Editor of Copyblogger.com, shares the one question that leads to writing top content.

Jon suffers from Spinal Muscular Atrophy, was expected to die before the age of 2, miraculously survived and is in a wheel-chair because his whole body is paralyzed. He can only move his lips – and yet he has become a top blogger.

You can either download the podcast (right-click or control-click the link), or read the transcript below.

Mary: You’re really one of the bloggers who have had the biggest impact on me because some of your posts are so outstanding. One of the things I read was your article ‘Fight for your Ideas’. In it you say, “Growing up I always had to fight to get people to listen to me.” Could you please tell us your story of overcoming great odds?

Jon: I was born with a form of muscular dystrophy that’s called spinal muscular atrophy. It primarily affects infants and it’s actually the number one genetic killer of infants in the world. The way the disease works is you slowly get weaker and weaker over time until the vast majority with my disease catch pneumonia and because they’re unable to cough, they eventually suffocate and die.

Almost everyone with my disease dies before the age of two. So growing up I was very quickly getting weaker and weaker. I’ve always been in a wheelchair. I quickly lost the ability to move anything but my face. Just going to school, to a regular public school, was a challenge. I went to college and getting people to listen to me there was a challenge, not because people don’t want to listen to people in wheelchairs but because they don’t really expect a lot. So it’s always a surprise when you pipe up and have something to say.

Mary: That’s such an inspiring story, Jon. So how do you manage to produce such amazing stuff? How do you manage the actuality of writing?

Jon: Well what I do is I use a software called Dragon Naturally Speaking. It’s a speech recognition software and I use that to write all of my posts.

I have probably the best speech recognition software money can buy. I’m in the best set-up you can buy. I have a $300 microphone, a special sound card and I can write … speak at about 120 words a minute with about 99.5% accuracy. So it gets about 1 in 200 words wrong when I’m talking. That allows me to write very effectively.

Then I have a mouse that I can actually operate with my lips. I’m actually using it right now. That allows me to use the mouse on the computer. So with those two combined I can pretty much do anything that anybody can on the web.

Mary: Your example shows that it’s possible to overcome any barrier.

Jon: In some ways I think my condition has actually helped me. I mean, the physical challenges are obviously something that has made things difficult, but it’s also focused me.

For example, when I was a kid it wasn’t possible for me to play sports or do a lot of the other things that kids do. The only options available to me were to watch TV, play video games or read books. And I didn’t care much for TV. I did play video games. But I also read a ton, mainly because I couldn’t go out and play. By the time I was five or six years old, I was reading two to three books a week. I remember when I hit eight or nine years old, I’d already read all the books for the entire year when I started that grade in school.

All that reading and exposure to great literature has helped me; it has made me a better writer. Because a big part of writing is also reading the great writers of the world.

Mary: There’s something about how you write that is really unforgettable. I saw a lovely passage you wrote when you said, “All of us have a primal need to be remembered, to pass something on to future generations, to leave some mark on the world to say I was here.” What does being unforgettable mean to you, Jon?

Jon: My biggest nightmare is that something would happen where I would no longer be able to care for myself and that I would end up in a nursing home and would catch pneumonia. And I would die with no one there to even see me die and they would only discover me afterward. Then, after I died they would just bury me or incinerate me with no one knowing me, no one caring and the world would just go on as if I’d never existed.

To me, that’s the most frightening thing in the world and one of the reasons I write is to put something out there that stands the test of time. So when I sit down to write a blog post I’m not just thinking about how to write a blog post. I think about how can I write something that will outlive me. How can I write something that people will be reading for years and years? That’s the type of content that I’m most interested in publishing, and I work really hard to try to achieve .

Mary: I think you do achieve it! I love the fact that you try to write content that can outlive you. What a fantastic goal for writing! That’s a very high bar, and that’s something to aspire to for all us bloggers.

Jon: A lot of people are shocked when they find out how much time I spend on my blog posts. I spend on average over 10 hours on every blog post that I write. People say, “Oh my god, how do you spend that much time?” The reason I spend so much time, is I want everything I publish to be fantastic. I don’t stop working on it until it is. When you look at the results of that, though, over two-thirds of the articles I write go viral on the web, especially when I’m writing for a big blogger like Copyblogger. It brings in thousands upon thousands of visitors. I have three different blog posts that have each been read by more than 100,000 people. For me, investing that time when I can use a blog post to connect with so many people is really worth it.

Mary: I’m really delighted that your blog, boostblogtraffic.com is going so well. What’s your goal with this blog, Jon?

Jon: I wanted a space of my own and I wanted to start building my own business too. Copyblogger.com is the biggest blog about content marketing on the web. I think we’re up to about 170,000 subscribers, over 3 million page views a month. It’s a big blog. I’ve been the associate editor there for about three years and they really, really spoil me. I mean the way they compensate me is fantastic. They take very good care of me, so for several years all I was doing was working with Copyblogger. I didn’t really have a home of my own.

But it occurred to me that it really wasn’t smart of me to not be building my own asset because – much as I love Copyblogger – it’s not mine.

That’s why I started Boost Blog Traffic and my goal is to build the largest blog in the world about blogging. It’s a community of bloggers who all want to learn how to get more traffic, to sell courses and software, and eventually turn that into a seven or even an eight figure per year business.

One of the things about bloggers is they start a new venture, publish a new piece of content, and then they expect it to spread on its own. Usually what happens is those ideas, without someone pushing them or marketing them, end up fizzling out . So I try to get the largest possible audience for my blog posts.

Mary: How do you do that?

Jon: I’m obnoxious about asking people to link to my stuff. I mean I’ve built a pretty good network and I get people to link to my posts on Twitter. Copyblogger is tweeting every single one of my posts. Darren at ProBlogger has tweeted several of them. I get friends to tweet them. I get people to share them on Facebook. I do interviews like these, where I talk about different things that I’ve written. I write guest posts for other big blogs, linking to my past work, run webinars, and so on.

Mary: It really seems like your writing is at the center of everything you do and somehow all these connections have come about through your writing. In one of your posts you say that your content is only as good as the connections it creates. Can you please say more about that?

Jon: A lot of people write content just because they believe that they need to be writing content. One of the things I try to do is to track the number of new subscribers or the new relationships that that blog post creates. That’s how I determine the value of a blog post. If you have a blog post that people send their friends you can literally be introduced to thousands or tens of thousands of people by writing a really great piece of content that people want to share with each other. .

The analogy that I like to give my students is imagine Martin Luther King, who’s one of the big Civil Rights leaders in the U.S. that fought to give equal rights to African Americans. As you know, he gave a historic speech called the I Have a Dream speech. Imagine if he’d given that speech to an empty room. It wouldn’t have done anybody any good. The only way for your content to do good is to get it out there in front of people. It’s all about connections more than anything else.

Mary: I suppose that also plays into guest blogging, doesn’t it? I know that you’ve really become a guest post expert and I love the course you’re doing at guestposts.com. What is one of your best tips for guest posts?

Jon: The big thing is to use your guest post to build a relationship with a big blog. The way that I’ve gotten to know a lot of popular bloggers online is that I write a really fantastic guest post for them. And then a month later, I write another really fantastic guest post. And another month later I write another really fantastic guest post. And because of that, they get more traffic and more subscribers to their blog.

It allows me to start an email conversation with that blogger. By doing that I’ve gotten to know some of the biggest bloggers in the world. I’ve built relationships without being able to leave my home. I’ve never been to a conference. I’ve never met anybody at Copyblogger. I’ve never met Darren at ProBlogger. I’ve never met any of the people I work with online. My guest posting has allowed me to connect with a lot of those superstar bloggers, build relationships with them and now when I ask them for favors, they’re happy to reciprocate and to do whatever they can for me.

Mary: Everything you do you do to the nth degree. I’m so in awe of what you’ve achieved, Jon.

Jon: One of the reasons why I think a lot of bloggers struggle is they’re not serious enough about being great. They look at blogging as something that they can do in thirty minutes and then they’re done. It doesn’t work that way. And it’s not their fault. I don’t mean to imply any blame because blogs don’t come with instruction manuals, right? We all kind of have to figure out how to use them.

Writing is an opportunity. If you do it well enough, you can change the lives of thousands of people. When I wrote my post on ProBlogger called ‘How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World’, it turned into the most shared post in the history of ProBlogger. When I wrote that post I actually got an email from a guy that said, “I was thinking about committing suicide this morning and a friend of mine sent this to me on Facebook and he knew I was down and he told me I had to read it. I read it and I have to tell you it gave me so much encouragement. Reading your story helped me so much that I’ve decided I’m going to give it another try. I’m going to keep going. I’d planned to commit suicide this afternoon but I just wanted you to know that you’ve changed my mind and you convinced me to give it another shot.”

When I read that I just sat at the computer and I cried because it just reaffirmed to me that the words that we write aren’t just ink. They’re not just ones and zeros floating through cyberspace. The words that we write can change people’s lives. If you treat them that way, if you treat them as something special and something that you need to do with excellence it can really do a lot for other people and in return it can do a lot for each of us. So that’s what I try to do and that’s what I try to encourage other bloggers to do as well.

Mary: It’s amazing to think that you, sitting in your wheelchair, have actually got the opportunity to change the world – and you do.

Jon: The things I’m most proud of are the guy didn’t commit suicide, that some readers have quit their jobs because they’ve gotten so much traffic and made so much money that they’re able to pursue those dreams. Those are the things that I’m going to be thinking about, when I’m hopefully 80 or 100 years old and lying in bed thinking about my life before it’s my time to die. Those are the things that I’m going to carry with me the most. That’s what’s most important to me.

Mary: Yes, it really is about that last look back to see what our life was about. And to ask, “What legacy am I leaving the world?”

Jon: One of the side effects of my disease is I’ve been very close to death a load of times. I’ve had pneumonia 17 times now. I’ve survived it every time. I’ve almost died over a dozen times and because of that I have a very strong sense of my own mortality and a very strong sense that I may not be here forever. In some respects that’s a gift because it allows me to stay focused on the things that really matter and not get so caught up in everything else.

That’s one of the gifts that my disability has given me and I’m really grateful for that.