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I'm just a dude who likes to talk about nerd stuff and entrepreneurship.
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.