[Day 8] How I Started Writing on Medium.com

Hello everyone. And welcome back to day eight of the Oren Cohen podcast. Today, we're going to talk about my writing journey with medium.com. I joined medium. In 2019 in February, 2019. And my arrival on medium was actually on. Sometime by the end of 2018, but I didn't realize it was actually medium yet. A friend of mine. Sent me a medium draft to help him review an article he wanted to publish. And I didn't really know that this was an open publishing platform. I just. Read the article.

And he told me that there was the ability to highlight if I wanted to add a private comment or something like that. And that was it. I didn't realize that this was an opportunity to start writing on this platform. And the months passed by. A few months later, I joined a CreativeLive class by Jeff Goins, who is a blogger, a famous blogger. And one of his guests on the course, one of the lessons was an interview with Shaunta Grimes which is a creator who I still follow to this day.

Her newsletter is amazing. She's Talking directly to me, like it's amazing. She knows perfectly how to do this. Her writing flows and you just read it and think like you're in a cafe with her and she's just talking with you about a thing. And then one day she sent me a newsletter.

She sent her list and newsletter and, The topic discussed in this newsletter was medium where she said she is starting to write there and she invited her mailing list to read her first article and also join medium as a writer. She is a creator focused, primarily on coaching writers, beginner writers. So. She also encouraged us, her followers to start writing on medium as well. And. One of the things she said was that the medium has started a partner program.

Which allows people like you and me to start earning money for the things that we write there. So that was a little bit of a. Ah-ha moment for me. Where I'm like, okay. I can write and get paid for it. I thought that The thing was that you write and you put ads on your writing, like you do on virtually any blog ever. And you get paid for. The ads, not the actual writing. But medium doesn't have ads at all. I joined medium and started writing.

The thing that happened next was a little bit mysterious to me because my first article in medium didn't do much. I got a, maybe a handful of views and it. Died. But I put a lot of effort into the next article, which was a really in-depth review. Or should I say. Tutorial of a software that I'm, that I used during my work back in the day. And I had a lot of problems with it and I was like, okay, if I'm having this problem, someone else might also be having this problem.

Let me try to write a guide for this and publish it on medium. And see how people react to it. And. I published it, it was a very long article. It was a hell to edit. A lot of, lots of formatting for code and a lot of small things that I needed to pay attention to. And as I published it, I continued with my Workday. And a few hours later, I got an email from medium. And that email from medium really changed my perspective about writing because up until that day, I was.

Thinking about writing as a solitary move. A solitary job. You write and you put it out there on the web and. If people find it awesome. If not, it's dead. But the email that I got. Presented. A new option, which meant that people on medium. We're actually. Reading my work. To decide whether to distribute it across the website. And they did it for that article. They pushed it to their homepage. Which was a really amazing thing. That I didn't really think would happen.

They put that article in a page dedicated to software engineering articles on their homepage. You don't get to every medium article, at least not back in the day. You couldn't reach every published article on medium. Through their homepage. Those links to each article were individual links. And if someone had the link. You could have found it, or you could have found it on a tag page, but how, but not on a topic page, which was on the main page on the homepage, medium.com/software-engineering.

So that was a really. Amazing. Eyeopening moment. And from that point onwards, I kept writing on medium and I got curated. That is the term for being distributed more broadly on the website. I got curated. Dozens of times over my time on medium. Sometime towards July of 2019. Another amazing moment happened. Which really kick-started my nerd content creation career. But I'll keep that for tomorrow. For now I want to end with what I learned from medium. Medium is really amazing in. Making you.

Realize that your writing matters. But it's also dangerous because if you are focused on writing for getting paid. You're not writing for a reader. You're writing for medium. Let me explain if you know that there are a set of rules that by following them, Would allow curation or allow distribution on the platform. Some writers would try to adhere to those rules. And write something that adheres to those rules.

But. Isn't necessarily of value to a reader, which means you could write a journal entry. And even though a journal entry would probably be formatted correctly, be with headers and all that. It probably won't be of. Value to a lot of people out there unless they know you or they are specifically looking for content like that. And a lot of the readers on medium are looking for answers for questions. As a software engineer, I can tell you from my own experience that.

I get a lot of medium articles in search results. Related to work queries on Google. Sometimes I get medium articles for non-work-related queries. But usually you would find that. Medium articles. Tend to get ranked on Google very highly. But you can't write on medium, whatever you want. And a lot of beginner writers would. Go chase that high of being curated instead of providing value to a reader. So those are my thoughts. I can also share in a different separate episode.

The things that I know. Or at least I experienced about. Getting. Good content published on medium. Let's do that tomorrow. I'll share my experiences. Good practices. I learned from writing on medium and Afterwards, we will continue to that story. Of How medium helped me reach. My nerd content creation career. And afterwards. We'll start talking about YouTube. Because YouTube is the next step for me after medium.

But other than that, thank you so much for listening or watching, whatever you decide. I have a newsletter where I write in-depth articles about content creation. You can find that in the description of the episodes. And, I'll see you in the next one. Bye for now.