"The Little Engine That Could" is a story about a little engine, a train, that thought he could climb uphill and kept saying, "I think I can, I think I can.
Bloggers also say, "I think I can, I think I can." They think they can take on the bigwigs of blogging and compete for search terms that will rank them on Google's Page 1.
Per my title, this is a sad tale. It's sad since blogger think they can write whatever they want and if they believe hard enough they can rank on Google's Page 1.
The truth is they CAN rank on Google's Page 1 if they don't write whatever they want. Bloggers need to tweak their content. 
They need to write content that meets two conditions.
- People want to read it.
- The bigwigs of their blogging niche don't want to write about it.
My article explains what you need to do to get search engine traffic. This case study was written by a Mommy blogger who gets over 100,000 page views a month. How does she do it? She generates search engine traffic.
https://www.mostlyblogging.com/how-to-generate-traffic-to-your-website/
You can too.
That is, if, you know how to outsmart the bigwigs at their own game.