How I Became a Popular Writer on Medium + Tips š„
by Bradley Nice, Content Manager at ClickHelp.com ā professional technical writing tool
The term āblogā was not coined until the late 1990s. Nowadays everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of blogging and there are lots of people who want to become or consider themselves bloggers.
My Story
As for me, Iāve been itching about blogging for a few years, but I couldnāt think of things that I could write about. Although I worked as a technical writer, it didnāt help much. Technical writing and blogging are niches that have very little in common.
One day I came across Medium. I scrolled though the main page and its eye-catchy titles, and soon found myself reading about all sorts of stuff. I fell in love with this platform. So I signed up, subscribed to a few writers and kept on exploring Mediumās blogging opportunities.
What made me love Medium even more is its intuitive post editor, itās minimalist style, embedding opportunities. I couldnāt but start writing and see how my text along with images transforms into some appealing to the eye composition. I wanted to start writing and publish my first posts, but I not only had whatās known as the writerās block, but also was unable to chose the topic.
Iāve started with some advanced technical writing stuff which was not the best choice for Medium, but this writing experience made me feel more confident. Soon I made up my mind about the topics and decided to write about design, web design and web development. I noticed that I was doing well, so I created LevelUp! publication, that nowadays has 7.4K+ followers and gets 3K+ views daily.
I started blogging on Medium in June 2016 and today I have 10.5K+ followers of my personal page.
To spread the word about LevelUp! I recently created a page on Product Hunt to get advice on how to make it better, gain more audience and visibility. You may help me to let more people learn about LevelUp! by giving it an upvote:
Tips on How to Rock on Medium
Itās been two years since I first started blogging here. So I had my good posts and bad post, the best posts and the worst posts. And I learned a lot through this.
Chose Your Topics Wisely
First of all, make sure that the topic youāre writing about has its audience on Medium. Remember how I started writing about technical writing when I didnāt know where to start? Writing about what you love and what you know about is a good start, but if you want to grow in the long run you need to write about more popular topics such as technology, science, design, and so on.
Apply Proper Formatting
Medium text editor provides lots of opportunities to design your content. You may use two-level headings, bold (ctrl+B) and italic (ctrl+I) formatting. You may also add links to the text or to the pictures (ctrl+K). Try different positioning of the images (click on the image to chose the positioning option). Consider using two different styles for quotes. You may also copy&paste YouTube links right into the editor and press Enter to get interactive embedded video in your published post. You may do the same with Tweets, SlideShare presentations and much more.
Use Visuals
Supply your text with pictures, photos, videos and infographics to help readers easily grasp the idea of your postās content and to connect with your readers.
Check Out Stats
To learn more about how your posts are doing, be sure to check out statistics. There you may learn about the number of your daily or monthly visitors, reads andfans (clappers) as well as number of views, reads and fans of a particular post.
More tips from Medium
Most Popular Posts of Mine
Below Iāll give examples of my posts that gained the most views and/or upvotes for you to inspire.
426K views (1st acc. to views number)
987 fans (1st acc. to clappers)
745 fans (2nd acc. to clappers)
What other tips and tricks do you use when formatting your posts?
Have a nice day!
Bradley Nice,
Content Manager at ClickHelp.com ā best online documentation tool for SaaS vendors
