A few weeks back, I published an article about tagging notes in Obsidian, relating to information that I read in the bonus chapter of Building a Second Brain:
This article ended up gaining some traction in the community, and was mentioned in a story by the CEO Tony Stubblebine, in a piece about the value of Medium:
“So, which was more valuable to my life, the NYTimes Russia coverage or Theo’s article on tagging strategies in Obsidian? Obviously this tagging article.”
When I looked closer at the statistics for the story, it turned out that I’d been blessed by the new ‘boost’ feature within Medium:
So I thought I’d share some brief advice for how I’ve gone from a single view in the month of January this year, which was when I started writing online, to this kind of recognition and engagement.
Let’s get started…
Write about what you know
I’ve said it before about finding a niche — you can have an interest in some things, and it’s somewhat valuable to express your interest in your writing. However, a lot of the time, people aren’t going to look to you as a figure of authority if you don’t have a depth of knowledge or experience in that topic, meaning you aren’t going to receive engagement to a higher level on your work.
People want information that’s going to move them forward in their life, not content that projects your uncertainty or inexperience onto them.
I found this when I was writing about meditation and weightlifting at the start of my online writing journey — I’ve meditated regularly before, as well as having been going to the gym for five years, but why would people care what I have to say when there are people like Arnold Schwarzenegger on the platform who they can take advice from instead?
You have to exploit your areas of deep knowledge.
For me, this was building systems for taking notes and creating content. I’ve been interested in the topic since last summer when I knew that I’d be heading to university. I researched deeply about note-taking and personal knowledge management, putting the information into action when building my own systems in apps like Obsidian and Capacities.
Because I’d gone to a level of research and implementation that few others had, I had knowledge that other people did not.
When I started posting stories about my exploits in Obsidian and other PKM apps, engagement increased massively from when I was writing about other things.
The attraction of my piece for Coach Tony was exactly this. Amongst his CEO-related duties, he didn’t have time to investigate tagging in PKM apps in the same way that I did, so he was happy to consume the story containing experience, skill, and knowledge that I’d synthesized from hours of experimenting and reading.
Make your content somewhat unique
Take things that people have written about before, and put a twist on them.
There are hundreds of articles out there on the book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. I knew this and realized that there was a bonus chapter at the end of the book that a lot fewer people would have heard of.
I went to the link that the book specified and consumed the information there, which was all about tagging in your second brain.
I now had an article that was about tagging strategies in a second brain — more specific than generic second-brain advice.
Going further, I could market the piece as advice from the “secret chapter” of the book (it was, I had to go to a completely separate webpage and download it), saying it was going to ‘supercharge your tagging’.
It’s an attention economy, and the title I used reached and engaged more people than it would have done had it been something like ‘Tagging notes in your second brain’.
Don’t overdo this and venture into the realm of clickbait, but it’s alright to add descriptiveness and feeling into your titles to encourage people to read. Remember though, if you aren’t authoritative and knowledgeable in the body of the piece you won’t have any luck getting your readers to stick around.
Reps, reps, reps
I’ve published almost 70 articles on Medium in the span of just over six months. Around 80 percent of these have come in the last three months. You have to produce consistently and take on feedback from the results of your past stories in order to level up your work.
You can tie this kind of iteration into discovering what people want to hear you write about at the start of your writing journey.
Look at what topics within your knowledge end up engaging an audience, then double down on them. Look at what subtopics engage better within this, and expand your writing on them.
Your audience’s interests are constantly changing and evolving — the world moves quickly, and therefore your content must too, otherwise you’ll get left behind because there are other writers of your quality who publish more prolifically.
This article that caught the attention of Coach Tony wasn’t special in any regard aside from the fact that it was noticed. I put the same level of effort, research, and production into every piece that I publish on this platform and elsewhere. This consistency just increased the chance that one of my articles was going to be noticed and shared with a wider audience.
Turn up, create, iterate, and keep going. It’s hard to fail when you do this consistently for some months.
There’s nothing special about me. You can write about your own expert knowledge that you possess and build a collection of content that people enjoy reading and learning from.
I hope that you have learned something new from this piece and, as always, thanks for listening!