At least a bit of marketing - eg. at least post it to a few social networks, can go a long way.
I always look at it as: the better the quality of the article the less hard you have to work at marketing.
Here's a few excerpts:
If your goal is to be heard, you need to fucking scream! We spend so much time crafting our thoughts into these prefect morsels of information, yet so little time finding an audience to read and acknowledge our work. The average blogger spends roughly 3.5 hours creating a blog post, yet only about 15 – 20 minutes promoting it.
It’s published! My work is over, it’s time to celebrate. Ugh, nope. It’s what you do after you hit that publish button that will set you apart from the rest.
Don’t believe the “if you build it, they will come” fallacy. It’s the single biggest reason most bloggers fail to secure an audience for their content and ignore the 80/20 principle. Having said that, finding an audience is no easy feat. In fact, most successful bloggers will argue it takes considerably more effort than the blog post itself. It’s a slow and steady process as each little plug here, a share there, a mention or a comment compounds the next until you start seeing serious results.
Source: http://blogenhancement.com/blog/2017/09/13/if-crafting-your-...
A lot of online spaces have rules against self promotion. I have not found much success by trying to promote my own writing myself.
I have to wonder what pieces of information are missing from such advice. I often feel like the monkey in some story I heard that learned the wrong word for some animal and this was reinforced by weird coincidence.
The other issue I run into is that I get the wrong kind of attention for the wrong things. This seems very resistant to being translated into anything desirable.
Being on the front page for a few hours will bring you more visits than google search for 10 years.
But if you are there, as a professional/expert in a specific subject, and provide "value" and stay on topic, it's usually OK to drop a link once in a while (sometimes for needed context).
I simply try and follow the Reddit famous "10% self-promo" rule everywhere, not just on Reddit.
You definitely need marketing to close the loop and get your writing to the readers, and it's a totally different skill set.
I'd there's another stage between writing and distribution, which is the editing/rewriting loop. The only kind of writing is rewriting, as a great (re)writer once said.[0] That means writing will probably take much longer than you expect, if you want it to strike the right tone and be true.
Another probably important point for aspiring writers is that in order to have something worth saying, you have to live something big, or learn something valuable, and generally observe things keenly if you want to have something new. (And if you don't plan to write something new, why are you writing at all?) So there's work to do before writing happens. You need to read and learn and ask questions of people who know more than you, so that you can distill everything you've read and bring it to the reader.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1025221-the-only-kind-of-wr...