Are You Writing on Medium for the Right Reasons?
Making your goal $$$ is the wrong goal to shoot for on Medium
I want to first commend you Kevin on being vulnerable and sharing your Medium journey. That’s not an easy thing to do. Especially if you feel your relative success has been less than admirable or even desirable. So thank you.
I would like to challenge you though. I believe a huge problem is your premise that your relative success on this platform is so intricately tied to financial success. If your primary reason for writing on Medium is to “make money,” then my recommendation to you is to find other people or companies to write on their behalf and get paid. In other words, just be a freelance writer for hire. (You might already be doing that.)
But if you’re using this platform to share your own writing, write what you’re passionate about. Period. If the only reason you’re writing certain pieces is that you think eventually it will get you Medium “success” and make you the next Tim Denning or Shannon Ashley, then you should hang up your laptop. It will show up in your writing and the authenticity won’t come through.
I once interviewed Jeff Cannata for a podcast I produced. Jeff is an actor and a successful internet personality. He’s co-host of the popular movie review podcast, Slashfilmcast. Whenever he’s asked “How do you become a success on YouTube, Twitter, podcasting, etc.” he gives the same advice. “Make what you want. Whenever people try to make something just for the money, it shows.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying don’t be strategic in how you pick your publications or even the headlines you choose. But the meat of your writing, the ideas that you want to share with the world, make sure they are coming from the heart.
Every single article I write on Medium is something I’m passionate about. Each one is a story, opinion, or bit of advice that is burning a hole in my brain and the pressure is so bad, I HAVE to write to get it out. And I think that authentic passion shows. I’ve been fortunate/blessed/lucky enough to have the last six articles I wrote curated to major topics. They range from articles as banal as how I use Asana to track my writing (curated to Writing and Productivity) to a very personal piece on how I feel as a black man in this country (just recently curated to Culture, Race, and Equality) to a fun and nostalgic article about mixtapes (curated to Music and Relationships). But I also have DOZENS of articles I think are just as good that are not published anywhere, not curated, and have zero to 10 claps, tops.
What each one of those articles has in common was a burning desire on my part to write them. Medium or not. If Medium didn’t exist, I would have put them on my blog.
Even the title of your piece betrays this issue. The fact you’ve been on here for eight months and you see it as “struggling.” I would never do anything for eight months if I considered it a “struggle,” unless it was a) a job paying my bills, or b) bringing me profound joy, and the “struggle” was in trying to get better at it.
Your “struggle” seems to be in your inability to earn as much money with your writing on Medium. My advice to you (unsolicited as it is) is to flip the script. Only write pieces that are burning your fingers to type into Medium. Because at the end of the day, if you can’t be filled with joy and fulfillment from writing on here even if you knew NO ONE would read it, then I don’t think it’s worth the time.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of filmmakers over the years. And the ones who have any kind of creative success always say the same thing: they would make films even if no one watched them. I think writing is a similar craft.
I bet if you changed your process to ONLY write what you’re passionate about, you WOULD see a change in your “success”—both personally, and financially.
God speed!
