How I Became a Top Medium Writer in Three Posts
“I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.” — Chinua Achebe
After three posts, I became a top writer in Black Lives Matters on Medium. It took five weeks.
I was shocked to find out — but when I considered how I’d been producing the posts — called “stories” in Medium jargon — I noticed I’d followed good habits taught to me by teachers I’ve met along the way — some of them Medium writers.
Becoming a top writer in Black Lives Matters just means I was recognized for a spike in readership in this category. You can go much farther than I have on Medium in a shorter period of time. Though I posted these stories in under five weeks — I wrote and posted regularly for four months — albeit on a different topic — before that to gain experience on the platform.
Good habits notwithstanding — it’s surprising I reached top writer status in Black Lives Matters when:
- I’m writing about Indigenous topics from a non-Native perspective
- Three posts took me 90 hours to write
- My first post on this theme was November 11th — from an online perspective, that’s everything happening in five weeks
But my experience writing on Medium goes back a bit further. While I’ve been posting about once a week since July 2021, my first post was in December last year. I spent the first half of this year working on my novel, and committed to posting on Medium after I lessened those hours. It’s been 24 weeks of consistent posting.
Most of my posts are about a topic that I know well — writing. I don’t have a passion for writing about writing — but it served some practical purposes.
It helped me:
- Develop a method to the process of researching, writing, and posting
- Promote my ghostwriting business
- Create content that is potentially valuable to readers
- Gain a general understanding of how Medium works
I wrote this way for three months. Overall, it was worth the time, even though those posts don’t get the same reception.
One reason for this is that I’m not a Medium partner. But, a more important reason is they don’t have titles to hook readers into them — and they’re boring topics. They have a place for readership — but it might not be on Medium.
To become a top writer on Medium, set parameters for what you’ll write about, make a writing plan, and follow through.
You’ll need to decide:
- The theme you’re going to write on — be passionate about your theme! When you decide what you’ll write — write widely in that subject to demonstrate authority of the topic you’re writing on.
- How you’ll construct your stories — writing also means taking notes, outlining, revising, linking text, and proofreading.
- When to write and when to post. Writing well is a job, do it consistently — pick a time block of the day and try generating content during it for a week. If it’s not working at that time, switch it up and choose another time block. But show up every day for the work and get through your tasks whatever it takes.
- When to publish — I recommend you post more often than I presently do
Whatever you write, make sure it has value. Your pieces are competing with the other 7.5 million blog posts published every day.
It’s not about getting views quickly — it’s about the material you post having longevity.
You want your material to be as valuable in five years as it is today. That guideline doesn’t work for all content — but for educative posts — it’s a good guideline to have in mind as you generate content.
When you develop your strategy, your work on Medium will be more valuable to you. When you value your work — you increase the chances that it’s beneficial to your readers.
I use a process that makes it easier to post content:
- Research and note-taking
- Compile bullet points from notes — only done for longer posts
- Drafting
- Revising — cut out embellishments [such as “very” and “so much”] and redundancies
- Adding/cutting text, linking
- Proofreading
- Selecting a quote and image for the piece — credit the source [ie Author name · Unsplash under the image you use]
- Choosing the right tags for your post
- Saving files of every post you write locally and in a cloud
They’re undergraduate guidelines for generating research papers.
The main takeaways here are to be passionate about what you write and consistent about generating content.
Develop a method to writing and a rhythm of generating work that is right for you — and stay in it. Write well. Post often.
Revision can take place after you post a story. Sometimes links break or information is outdated, or there’s an unclear sentence to revise. Update your draft and repost it. This practice is proven to increase domain authority in websites — it’s smart to do if you want your content to remain sharp.
There’s a lot of competition out there.
Stay focused and keep building your theme.
And think of it this way — you're not competing with anyone — people are competing with you.
