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Hello everyone.

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And welcome back to day eight
of the Oren Cohen podcast.

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Today, we're going to talk about
my writing journey with medium.com.

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I joined medium.

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In 2019 in February, 2019.

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And my arrival on medium was actually on.

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Sometime by the end of 2018, but I didn't
realize it was actually medium yet.

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A friend of mine.

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Sent me a medium draft to help him
review an article he wanted to publish.

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And I didn't really know that this
was an open publishing  platform.

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I just.

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Read the article.

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And he told me that there was the
ability to highlight if I wanted to add

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a private comment or something like that.

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And that was it.

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I didn't realize that this
was an opportunity to start

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writing on this platform.

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And the months passed by.

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A few months later, I joined a
CreativeLive class by Jeff Goins,

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who is a blogger, a famous blogger.

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And one of his guests on the course,
one of the lessons was an interview

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with Shaunta Grimes which is a creator
who I still follow to this day.

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Her newsletter is amazing.

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She's Talking directly
to me, like it's amazing.

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She knows perfectly how to do this.

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Her writing flows and you just read it and
think like you're in a cafe with her and

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she's just talking with you about a thing.

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And then one day she sent me a newsletter.

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She sent her list and newsletter and,  The
topic discussed in this newsletter was

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medium where she said she is starting
to write there and she invited her

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mailing list to read her first article
and also join medium as a writer.

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She is a creator focused, primarily
on coaching writers, beginner writers.

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So.

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She also encouraged us, her followers
to start writing on medium as well.

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And.

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One of the things she said was that the
medium has started a partner program.

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Which allows people like you and
me to start earning money for

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the things that we write there.

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So that was a little bit of a.

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Ah-ha moment for me.

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Where I'm like, okay.

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I can write and get paid for it.

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I thought that The thing was that you
write and you put ads on your writing,

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like you do on virtually any blog ever.

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And you get paid for.

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The ads, not the actual writing.

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But medium doesn't have ads at all.

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I joined medium and started writing.

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The thing that happened next was a
little bit mysterious to me because my

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first article in medium didn't do much.

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I got a, maybe a handful of views and it.

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Died.

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But I put a lot of effort
into the next article, which

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was a really in-depth review.

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Or should I say.

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Tutorial of a software that I'm, that
I used during my work back in the day.

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And I had a lot of problems with
it and I was like, okay, if I'm

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having this problem, someone else
might also be having this problem.

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Let me try to write a guide for
this and publish it on medium.

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And see how people react to it.

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And.

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I published it, it was
a very long article.

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It was a hell to edit.

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A lot of, lots of formatting for
code and a lot of small things

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that I needed to pay attention to.

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And as I published it, I
continued with my Workday.

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And a few hours later, I
got an email from medium.

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And that email from medium really
changed my perspective about writing

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because up until that day, I was.

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Thinking about writing as a solitary move.

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A solitary job.

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You write and you put it
out there on the web and.

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If people find it awesome.

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If not, it's dead.

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But the email that I got.

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Presented.

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A new option, which meant
that people on medium.

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We're actually.

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Reading my work.

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To decide whether to distribute
it across the website.

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And they did it for that article.

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They pushed it to their homepage.

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Which was a really amazing thing.

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That I didn't really think would happen.

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They put that article in a page
dedicated to software engineering

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articles on their homepage.

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You don't get to every medium
article, at least not back in the day.

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You couldn't reach every
published article on medium.

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Through their homepage.

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Those links to each article
were individual links.

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And if someone had the link.

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You could have found it, or you could
have found it on a tag page, but how,

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but not on a topic page, which was
on the main page on the homepage,

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medium.com/software-engineering.

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So that was a really.

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Amazing.

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Eyeopening moment.

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And from that point onwards, I kept
writing on medium and I got curated.

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That is the term for being distributed
more broadly on the website.

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I got curated.

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Dozens of times over my time on medium.

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Sometime towards July of 2019.

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Another amazing moment happened.

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Which really kick-started my
nerd content creation career.

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But I'll keep that for tomorrow.

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For now I want to end with
what I learned from medium.

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Medium is really amazing in.

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Making you.

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Realize that your writing matters.

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But it's also dangerous because if you
are focused on writing for getting paid.

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You're not writing for a reader.

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You're writing for medium.

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Let me explain if you know that
there are a set of rules that by

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following them, Would allow curation
or allow distribution on the platform.

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Some writers would try
to adhere to those rules.

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And write something that
adheres to those rules.

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But.

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Isn't necessarily of value
to a reader, which means you

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could write a journal entry.

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And even though a journal entry would
probably be formatted correctly,

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be with headers and all that.

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It probably won't be of.

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Value to a lot of people out there unless
they know you or they are specifically

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looking for content like that.

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And a lot of the readers on medium
are looking for answers for questions.

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As a software engineer, I can tell
you from my own experience that.

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I get a lot of medium
articles in search results.

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Related to work queries on Google.

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Sometimes I get medium articles
for non-work-related queries.

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But usually you would find that.

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Medium articles.

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Tend to get ranked on Google very highly.

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But you can't write on
medium, whatever you want.

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And a lot of beginner writers would.

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Go chase that high of being curated
instead of providing value to a reader.

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So those are my thoughts.

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I can also share in a
different separate episode.

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The things that I know.

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Or at least I experienced about.

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Getting.

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Good content published on medium.

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Let's do that tomorrow.

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I'll share my experiences.

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Good practices.

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I learned from writing on
medium and Afterwards, we

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will continue to that story.

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Of How medium helped me reach.

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My nerd content creation career.

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And afterwards.

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We'll start talking about YouTube.

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Because YouTube is the next
step for me after medium.

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But other than that, thank
you so much for listening or

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watching, whatever you decide.

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I have a newsletter where I write
in-depth articles about content creation.

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You can find that in the
description of the episodes.

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And, I'll see you in the next one.

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Bye for now.