If I’m honest, I didn’t expect much from writing on Medium…
The related goal for 2023 was to publish 10 articles on the platform.
But, by the title of this piece, it’s clear that I outdid my own expectations of myself, publishing ten times as many pieces as I challenged myself to do. This is disregarding the fact that there are still more than four months left in the year!
This journey has, outside of the articles published, so far amassed over six hundred followers. My views and reads generated over $1.2k of earnings during the months of June and July.
Not bad for an untested writer who hadn’t published an article on the internet before the third of January.
What’s more, I did this without very much extra research, teaching only what I’d learned through living and improving my life.
Here’s how you can achieve what I did too…
Ideas
The first thing that’s brought to light by potential new writers is the idea that they don’t know what they’d write about.
Let me tell you something…
Unless you’ve spent your life wrapped up in cotton wool and had everything put on a plate for you, you’ve likely had to work or learn to achieve some kind of outcome during your life.
This can vary enormously. From building a business to raising a child to training for an equestrianism competition, I firmly believe that 99% of people have some kind of knowledge or expertise that can be leveraged to create online content.
Dickie Bush has a good test to reveal what some of these topics might be for you. It’s called the Two Year Test…
You think of every challenge that you’ve faced, learned about and overcome in the last two years.
Then you use these suggestions to inform what you’ll be able to provide value to others about.
You’ve reached an achievement or an outcome that’s taken significant effort or sacrifice, so people want to know about your story and how you managed to achieve what you did.
Another thing…
They’ll read for the value that you provide as opposed to how good your writing is.
This counter-argues the other common excuse that comes up before people begin writing — that they’re not good enough.
This is not really an excuse when you’re sharing value — there are grammar and spelling checkers that make sure the technical side of your work is alright, so all you have to do is put your wisdom on the page for others to learn from.
The next step is to become consistent with posting your content so that it reaches more people. This will also help you to find a niche that you can engage in on a regular basis…
Niche
The recipe for engaging a lot of people is to find a topic that’s at the intersection of your interests and something that’s in the public eye at the moment.
This is how I first built an audience — I was writing about Obsidian, which is my knowledge, and I integrated some AI into things, which is the current interest of the people of the world, so there was a lot to be learned that was useful and relevant in my article, therefore people read it.
From this point, I started posting more often about Obsidian and AI, and my audience continued to grow.
One of the most effective ways to do this in whatever field you might be writing about is to add technology to the topic. Say you’re an avid walker, you could write about technology that helps navigation, or prevention of danger or something similar.
If you have experience using this tech, even better. If not, just make assumptions based on your experience, alongside some research.
This works because technology is becoming more and more prevalent in life in general, and people are inherently interested in what’s going to improve their experience, which most technology normally does.
This brings us to the last, and continuing, part of my method for growing on Medium…
Iteration and improvement
This is extremely important. You have to become flexible because the online world moves very quickly.
Even recently, the Medium algorithm that determines what a creator gets paid is changing so that it’s focused more on the effect that the piece has on people, measuring responses and claps, as opposed to the information that’s actually valuable to the people in the article.
This isn’t ideal for my own work, as someone who posts more information-based content around my knowledge rather than story-based content around my experiences (which relates to more people and therefore earns more now), but you have to learn to adapt and overcome changes.
This is what I’m doing now. I’m writing less frequently, but the pieces I do publish, like this one, are of higher quality and cover more of my own story.
Your knowledge isn’t going to remain relevant forever (hence testing for only the previous two years when panning for subjects), so you have to continue living your life and gaining new experiences.
Then write about these too.
There are some topics that hang around forever though, and you would do well to broadly center your writing and information that you provide within these categories.
The entrepreneur Dan Koe calls them eternal markets, labelling them as health, wealth, relationships and happiness. If you can solve problems for people in these areas using your experience or expertise, you’ll always find engagement with your work.
Within your own writing, look at trying to evolve a style or certain traits. This is so that people can recognise that it’s you writing, not some kind of bot — they look at something in your piece and it reminds them of you because of the personality hidden there.
People will come back to your work for this personality, and this is how you convert recurring readers into followers, and in the future into buyers (hopefully). I’m not at this stage yet, so I don’t have much knowledge to offer for now.
Following this, all I did was iterate my work based on what resonated with my audience and what didn’t, through noticing trends in read time and engagement.
I cut out what didn’t work, doubling down on what seemed to have an effect, and this has grown my audience through continual improvement.
I hope you’ve found value in this article. The best thing you can do to support it is to react with a clap and a comment (costs nothing, helps me a lot). Thanks for reading!