How To Become a Popular Hip-Hop Blogger Without Even Trying

by Rob Stiles

Here’s the take-away: You don’t have to be a strategic writer/marketing guru/social media wizard. Be like me, do whatever the fuck you want, and you can gain literally hundreds of followers who won’t read your shit. It’s like watching the death of journalism and literacy in real-time!

I started blogging in mid-2013. There was a huge niche in online hip-hop blogging that needed to be filled. Namely, not enough people on the Internets were writing disparaging articles about rappers and music executives.

Back during hip-hop’s heyday, it used to be that you had to intern up at Def Jam or The Source, write a lot, and make the right connections in order to secure yourself with a cushy writing job. You also had to build a reputation as a good writer, in the hopes of people cutting you checks for your writing, I guess.

Medium.com allows me to forego having to put any actual effort in establishing a hip-hop writing career. I can post rambling long-form articles about whatever I want without getting paid for it, which often feels like screaming into a void. It’s the American dream, sort of.

Yet with a full-time job, girlfriend, and part-time schooling, it’s pretty hard to be a consistent writer. This served as the impetus behind starting a Medium Publication called “Strictly for the Heads,” where I could publish randomly in long-form, which I find more fun to write than short-form. I also did a couple of interviews, a historical piece, and started publishing an unauthorized biography on Jay-Z in serial format. Fun stuff!

On the Internets, the measure of a successful writer seems to be how many clicks or reads you can attract. Recently, I received a notification on Medium.com informing me that my publication had amassed a large number of followers:

“Wow,” I thought, “Not being a prolific writer is working out great for me.” I had done absolutely nothing to promote my publication, aside from linking to my publication’s articles at HoobityBlah.com.

I decided to look at my stats on Medium.com to see if hundreds of people had read my articles and actually liked them.

I have 500 subscribers, but less than 500 people have actually read my articles in the past month. The numbers suggest that people are indiscriminately subscribing to my publication, without really reading any of the articles. One explanation could be that I don’t actually have 500 subscribers, but Medium.com doesn’t have a way of reporting who’s subscribed to your publication.

All of this leads me to the following conclusions and tips, which will hopefully help you readers (or non-readers, apparently) establish an amazing writing career like mine:

1. Content literally doesn’t matter. Nobody reads content.
2. Since content doesn’t matter, use your time online to send as many words “downrange” as you can. It’ll make you a better writer. Just think that everything is practice!
3. Use cool pictures that are easy for your illiterate crowd to look at, hopefully conveying the gist of what you spent hours writing about.
4. Hip-hop is a popular topic. If you can form a half-baked opinion about a new song or artist, you’re halfway to getting thousands of subscribers on Medium.
5. Medium might be crawling with robots who subscribe to publications for no reason.
6. If you can sell advertising space in your Medium articles, you might be able to monetize what no one else on the Internets will give you money for.
7. I love Diet Coke®.
8. If you get popular on Medium, a lot of spam-bots that post pornographic pictures will follow you on Twitter. No joke.