It took me 100 posts to get my first big story on Medium

It’s all about persistence

I joined Medium back in 2014 when Medium was in its invite-only period. I emailed them and asked for an invitation, and next day I was on Medium.

What I liked about Medium were its simplicity and the exclusivity, and it was cool to be on Medium because not everyone can blog on Medium. Medium changed from time to time, I liked some changes some changes I didn’t like. But I always loved the simplicity and the editor on Medium.

I first started blogging 9 years back on Blogger, I blogged about tech, social media, infosec on different platforms. After joining Medium I was just casually blogged on it. I never had any post that went viral. I didn’t blog for a couple of years because I was too busy at medical school, life was tough exams were hard there was no time for blogging.

It was only recently I started blogging regularly. Ironically it took me 100 posts to get my major story on Medium. My 100th post about the Facebook explore feed (the news feed change) attracted more than 77K reads counting in just 3 days, and made me a top writer on ‘social media’.

What was even more ironic was the fact that I never expected it to attract this much of attention, and I never prepared for the post and I haven’t given much thought about what I wanted to write about like in my previous 99 posts. I wrote about what I experienced expressed what I felt about it, that was all I did.

The only thing I did after writing was to submit it to Hacker News and share it on Facebook and Twitter, like I always do after writing a blog post.

So what did I learn from all of this?

Write what you feel like writing, don’t think too much or prepare too much for what you are going to write, just write what you experience.

Don’t keep it to yourself, I could have published the story and let it just be on Medium, but I shared my post on the internet. And all it took was just one person to share it in his network.

And never quit writing, writing is a way of expressing yourself. It’s not about the number of page views you are going to get. Never let the small reads discourage you, write whenever you can. It’s not about the views but all about expressing yourself.

What is your story on Medium?