Since beginning to write on Medium, I’ve learned a lot about engaging an audience and keeping views high on my work, and there was one mistake that stopped my progress during the first couple of months on the platform.
This was writing to an audience that didn’t exist. What I mean by this is I wasn’t sharing any value with people in my writing, so they had no reason to click on, follow or otherwise engage with my work.
When I started writing about my higher-level knowledge, I started gaining a wider audience, building a platform from which I could start to expand my writing topics, whilst still maintaining some engagement in what I was writing.
This piece is going to cover in more depth the mistake I made, and how I went about growing an audience once I realised the mistake I made. I’ll show you how you can start growing an audience of your own, through only knowledge that you already have…
The mistake I made
When I came to writing on Medium, I’d spent a large portion of the previous year trying to improve my life through various habits like meditation, journalling and others, but I was still very uncertain about the effectiveness of the whole process.
Despite this uncertainty, I decided to write about the topics anyway, creating articles such as ‘Meditation — What Nobody Tells You’ and ‘Two Lessons You Will Learn From Lifting Weights’.
Nobody read these pieces.
I was simply projecting the uncertainty that I had about these topics onto other people. I had no authority, so I wasn’t building any kind of engagement. Why was anyone going to listen to my advice about lifting weights when Arnold Schwarzenegger has a Medium account that they can read from instead?
This all changed when I wrote a piece about using artificial intelligence in a note-taking app called Obsidian. I’d been using Obsidian for about 9 months when I wrote this piece and had built up a level of proficiency in the app that few people had done. That meant that this piece was more unique and informative, and had more to offer than my previous work.
From this point, I continued to write about Obsidian and watched my engagement and follower rate skyrocket.
How you should start out
The advice that I give here is similar to my guide of Nailing Your Niche on Medium.
The trendy advice right now is that you are the niche, along with your interests and your personality. Everyone’s building a personal brand, and although I think that this is a good direction to take yourself ultimately when you have a following, it’s more important to provide value to an audience before you do this.
The first step is to find something that you have nearly expert-level knowledge in. Don’t worry if you think you’re being too specific. There are billions of people on the internet — you’re not going to be short of an audience.
There’s always something that you know about that you can be writing about. Very rare is a person on this Earth who has gone through life without looking deeply into one subject or another.
Often, you can write about your interests anyway, because of the fact that they’re your interests. The fascination you have often drives you to dive deeper than most into the topic, therefore gaining the expert knowledge you need to be able to share a lot of value about the subject.
The best topics to find are the ones which are an intersection between your own expert-level knowledge and topics that are popular at the moment. That’s what I struck gold on with Obsidian — everyone’s interested in AI and building a second brain at the moment, and I know about these topics. It was a recipe for success the second I started writing about it.
This diagram is one that I shared in my free guide that I think illustrates the point nicely…
Start sharing your own knowledge, experience and growth in learning about the topics that fit the intersection for you.
Focus on providing massive value to your audience, for free. This is going to be what gets you followers — if people see you have a large portfolio of work that they’re interested in, they’re more likely to return and follow you than if you have maybe one or two articles on the topic.
Keep iterating your work, so that you’re constantly pushing for improvements and upgrades to your writing. This keeps your ideas fresh so that people don’t get bored with what you’re posting.
This is the main process of gaining an initial audience when starting to write. You can then transition into writing about wider content in general, similar to what you might do as a personal brand…
Transitioning into a personal brand
This is a long-term goal for any writer who wants to build an engaged audience. You want people to follow you for you and your personality and advice, not just for the knowledge and information that you provide.
The reason for this is sustainability. When you’re writing as a personal brand, you can follow your interests and fascinations, and simply the fact that you have an audience base adds enough social proof to the work that people will read what you have to say.
All you have to do is live a deep, challenging and meaningful life, and your writing will come out engaging and meaningful. Mess up, learn, improve and document the whole process.
Keep writing content to do with your expert-level knowledge, but you can start to also weave in the pieces about meditation, lifting weights and the like. It’s easier to keep the audience engaged if you relate these things to your expert knowledge because that gives you more authority — the audience wants this expert knowledge, so they’re going to pay attention to what you do regardless of whether it’s relevant to the building the knowledge or not.
This is how I’d go about starting writing again if I had to:
- Find a niche that’s a topic in the public eye that I have deep knowledge about,
- Write about it at volume so that I build authority and return readers,
- Start to add content that’s related to your wider life, transforming yourself into a personal brand. Because you’re writing about your learning and experiences, you’ll never run out of interesting content and ideas if you live your life to its potential.
I hope that you’ve learned something new from this piece, and as always, thanks for reading!