5 Evergreen Lessons Medium Taught Me About Growing an Online Audience

In short, do your best work. People like to read things that are just good.

Being good means being skilled, knowledgeable, and passionate about improving your craft.

Being early is a helpful strategy to get out in front of your niche on a platform, but if you aren’t skilled, you’ll fall behind. Mediocrity is forgettable. Unfollows come from errors.

Differentiation is fundamental in any economy with competition: In order for any new endeavor to succeed, it must be remarkably different. So when you enter a new community like Medium or another platform, your work has to stand out. Pick your niche (the one you love and have expertise in), and stay focused on it.

Nicolas Cole wrote that the number one key to success as a writer is volume. How will people read your work if you’re not writing it? Output (a.k.a. hard work) is the key to staying atop feeds with time-decay algorithms.

Increasing your output is a way to improve the odds that your work will get in front of the right people at the right time.

Be consistent, be seen, get noticed, grow a following, and maybe… get lucky (i.e., Medium picks your piece for a featured story).

This “vulnerability” is what makes a reader relate and a story stick.

It’s how writers build an empathetic connection with readers. It’s human. And it can’t be faked.

If you write in a voice that is not your own, it begins to plant a question in the reader’s mind that, with time, widens from a crack to a chasm.

The reader starts to wonder: Where is this coming from? I’ve seen this before — are you copying someone else? What’s the real reason you wrote this?

Do this instead: Honesty, articulated crisply by a self-aware person, is always interesting to read, watch, or listen to.