Content Marketing Strategy
8 Proven Tips to Build a Rock-Solid Reading Audience on Medium
A game-changing strategy for freelance writers to turn loyal readers into advocates for sustainable business outcomes
Introduction
Let’s face it. You might be writing about the most exciting and important topics with high-quality and stylish content; however, if you don’t have a loyal reader base, your content means nothing more than a personal diary.
If we don’t have advocates, we cannot grow. I am sorry to offend idealist friends, but I found success in pragmatic approaches with due respect.
This article is not a theoretical piece and not sugar-coated, even though it has an inspirational and motivational aspect. I am not here to preach and repeat dull advice with nitty-gritty points.
Instead, I want to share my four decades of content development and marketing strategies with practical and digestible tips documented in case studies.
These strategies were also proven by hundreds of successful content developers, including bloggers and freelancers I mentored and many inspiring authors who mentored me in this exciting journey.
Every tip in this post represents my journey full of valuable professional and life lessons. Like everyone else, I made many mistakes but found practical ways to turn my errors into valuable learning experiences.
The more mistakes I made in this journey, the faster I grew in any initiative. Writing practice was one of them.
I have an eclectic writing portfolio, from deep technical and scholarly papers to practical and entertaining content. This flexibility excited me and increased my joy.
I don’t see writing as a profession. Instead, my hobby accidentally turned into an income-generating business over the years. In other words, I don’t write to earn money. I write to give value to my readers. This approach has been sustainable for my personal and business growth.
Here are the key strategic points that helped me develop a rock-solid reading audience:
1 — Start with a Growth Mindset
Having a growth or fixed mindset determines our success or failure in any endeavor. This mindset applies to writing practice as well. Openness and tolerance to uncertainty are the starting point in the entrepreneurship journey.
First, we must accept that not everybody will like what we do, even if we are the most inspiring writer globally.
Millions of readers like Harry Potter; however, still, many people dislike it. A book set of J.K Rowling received over 50K reviews just on the Amazon platform. Heaven knows how many are in other venues! While 92% loved it, you can still see 1% who rated it as one star. Good for her!
This phenomenon is not just for writers. It applies to all professions. For example, Millions love Lady Gaga, but thousands dislike her, as I mentioned in this story: What Writers & Readers Can Learn From Lady Gaga: Resilience & confidence preventing petty critics from ruining creative dreams.
From my experience, my most-selling book had the most criticism. Around 90% of readers loved it, and 10% criticized it. So I trained my brain to focus on the 90% and leverage the 10% to sharpen my sword. How To Deal With Negative Criticism: Why Criticism Hurts So Much And How We Can Benefit From It.
When I shared one of my award-winning ideas on a platform, a reader said, “it stinks like an armpit”. I said, “fair enough”. The response gave me a few giggles and increased my compassion for the reader as he lacked the education to understand the value of content for society. I wished I could have invested time to help the reader.
The more I tolerate uncertainty and criticism, the more readers I gain over the years. Manifestation Starts With Uncertainty And Ambiguity: The more tolerant we are to uncertainty the more successful we become.
2 — Test the Waters with Diversification and Incremental Steps
Entrepreneurs grow with experimentation and incremental progress. Freelance writers can survive and thrive with an entrepreneurial approach.
Freelance writing has two legs: creativity and an entrepreneurial approach. Unfortunately, walking with one leg is hard and almost impossible.
I started this platform in October 2019 by posting a single article about IoT, which had very few views let alone readers. I had no clue what I was supposed to do. But I was willing to test the waters based on my previous experience on other platforms.
Since my technical piece did not produce the desired outcome, I started sharing posts from my leadership portfolio. These posts made a much better impact than the technical ones.
Understanding reader expectations take time and require multiple trials and errors. For example, while an article I wrote about the security implications of IoT (Internet of Things) received only ten views, an article about eliminating my loose skin received over 10,000 views. Evidently, more readers are interested in hanging skin in my belly than protecting IoT devices in the corporate world.
This priority might not make sense to some, but it is true. We cannot change the truth, but we can adapt to reality. However, when I shared the IoT article in a technical community, it received thousands of views. So, my point is market awareness matters to survive and thrive in business.
3 — Find a Niche and Show Differentiators
As mentioned in the previous point, I tried multiple topics and found a niche to attract a unique audience.
When I shared my self-improvement tips, I understood that this was where a majority of my audience existed on a particular platform. So I set up a unique publication to nurture my regular readers through a content portal for easy access.
While the content on a particular topic shines on a platform, it may underperform on others. Awareness of this fact is essential to keep our expectations and sustain our motivation.
Diversification is a great strategy. However, I wouldn’t attempt to sell women’s underwear at a religious gathering. You get my point about the importance of context and relevance.
4 — Show up Consistently with Enthusiasm
Showing up is a critical business success factor in any discipline. This type of commitment and persistence applies to writers as well. Enthusiasm is contagious. Emotions sell better than thoughts.
The frequency and intensity of our posts matter. The more frequently and passionately we write, the higher our chance of finding new readers.
None of my well-thought articles went viral. However, several passionate ones, including sensation with logic, performed better and reached a broader audience.
Frequent delivery is essential to broaden the audience. For example, an author with one book and the same writer with ten books might have different audience profiles.
When I published my first book, I gained some readers. However, I saw the real difference after publishing my tenth book. I shared my unique marketing experience in this story: The Joy of Selling 1,000+ Books In A Month With Minimal Investment: Practical and unique marketing techniques for creative freelancers leading to profitable sales with concrete examples.
In addition, the more frequently we satisfy the needs of our regular readers, the more sustainable our writing practice gets. I elaborate on this in the next section.
5 — Transform Followers to Regular Readers
To find regular readers, first, we need to find some followers initially; even though followers don’t matter as much as subscribers and regular readers, we still need some followers.
I started with a single follower on this platform in October 2019. And six followers a month after. However, having a single follower to 3,000 took me 12 months, as shown in this screen capture. Then it took me another year to gain extra 4,000 followers.
The most crucial factor in gaining regular readers is to satisfy their needs. Need satisfaction is the most critical aspect of transforming followers into regular readers. This strategic approach will retain our readers and create a sustainable reader base.
What can we do to satisfy our readers? First, we must accept that readers are humans. They have requirements and expectations. They want to get the value of our content. So we need to keep in mind what value our content can produce for the reader.
Building an email list has been the most helpful marketing and selling strategy in my writing career. I won’t repeat the details for this item as I shared my experience in this story: Subscribers Can Produce 50 Times Better Results Than Followers for Freelance Writers: How I gained 100K subscribers in a decade. 12 powerful strategies, tactics, and techniques to create a solid mailing list.
One critical success point is to respond to comments by our readers and to answer their questions via email or on social media satisfactorily. Supporting our readers via various means is critical to keep them.
6 — Keep Experimenting
Even though we may have a reader base, we must keep experimenting with growing our audience. As mentioned in the first item, an entrepreneurial mindset is essential for freelance writers.
Some think that freelancers are sole traders, and entrepreneurship skills do not apply. I disagree with this point of view. Every freelancer needs to think and feel like an entrepreneur to grow and scale their business. I shared my thoughts in this story: Do You Want to Become A Sexy Entrepreneur? If so, you may read these insightful stories and gain new perspectives from them.
I started my education and career in traditional settings following waterfall methods which forced me towards perfection. Although theoretically and ideally, perfection sounded great, it was awful in practice. It caused me more stress, slowed my progress, and almost failed me.
I noticed a massive growth in my career only after embracing imperfection and striving for excellence rather than perfection. Learning how to fail fast and cheap has paid dividends. I learned to work smart, not only hard.
Learning and practicing the agile approach in my career, including writing practice, has been an investment in my growth and sustainability. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of experimentation and development incrementally without obsessing over perfection. Many failed projects in my observations were results of perfection and gold-plating.
A Design Thinking approach contributed to my technical career and writing practice too. I shared my experience on how writers can use design thinking in this story: Power of Design Thinking for Writers: Design Thinking is one of the most powerful tools I use for my professional and personal goals.
I even experimented with unique affiliate marketing tactics to support a certain group of readers who admired my selected products and services for them. I documented my insights on the effective use of affiliate marketing for freelance writers in a practical book that is available for the members of this platform: The Power of Digital Affiliate Marketing -Chapter 1: How Authors Can Write More And Earn Passive Income.
7 — Giveback Generously and Meaningfully
I observed the scarcity versus abundance mindset for a long time. I noticed that all successful people give generously even if they are not vocal about their contributions to society. Giving can be tangible and intangible.
By giving, we don’t lose anything; instead, we gain a lot. Sometimes the gain might not be tangible, but intangible outcomes could be more valuable. For example, the joy of giving can enhance our mental health and life satisfaction.
Many rich people find happiness in philanthropy. There are myriad examples, such as Jamsetji Tata, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Azim Premji, Li Ka-shing, Andrew Carnegie, Chuck Feeney, MacKenzie Scott, Alisher Usmanov, and many more.
As we grow, there will always be people behind us who might need our support. Our support, help, and contributions to disadvantaged people is a charitable activity. Taking these people under our wings creates a win-win situation and opens the serendipity doors and windows.
Sharing our lessons with beginners can give us profound pleasure. For example, I penned this article thinking about giveback to a broader community. Sharing my hard-learned lessons and hoping some new writers might benefit from them gives me joy.
As giveback is an altruistic and spiritual act, it makes a massive impact in connecting with a broader audience. But, practically, a daily dose of an act of kindness is a quick way to implement this principle, leading to serendipity.
Serendipity is not mambo jumbo. It is a scientifically proven phenomenon. Serendipity, under various names, is used in science and technology. For example, the serendipity machine by Marlin Minsky inspired many computer and cognitive scientists. It is a universal and a quantum phenomenon too.
Mentoring, coaching, and guiding others are examples of giving back to individuals and communities. In addition, the people we help can be advocates of our services which I touch on in the next section.
8 — Moving from Loyalty to Advocacy as a Game-Changing Strategy
I left this critical point to the last as this is the ultimate success factor for authors. In business, scalability is an effective growth strategy.
We cannot grow our business unless we learn how to scale it. Therefore, scaling a business is another essential entrepreneurial skill that freelance writers need to acquire.
It is excellent to have loyal readers. However, unless we transform them into our advocates, we cannot grow sustainably.
Let’s say that you have 100 regular readers. We can be in good shape if we keep having the same number of regular readers or maybe grow 10% with the previous strategies. So it is not too bad for some of us.
However, if these 100 people can bring at least one new reader, we can gain 200 regular readers. And these 200 can get one reader, our baseline moves from 100 to 300. This compound effect depicts how entrepreneurs scale their businesses sustainably.
Conclusions
Some of us write for the sheer joy of writing for various reasons. However, writing is a core business for many freelance writers. To be successful freelance writers, we need lucrative customers, known as regular readers. However, to grow and scale the business, we need advocates.
Nothing is more important than loyal and evangelist readers for writers. Therefore, an investment in understanding the nature of our readers, finding them, and growing them methodically for advocacy is essential for freelance writers.
While the quality, quantity, and variety of our products and services matter, we also need to think outside the box and create serendipity through synergistic activities. I called it giving back meaningfully, generously, and graciously.
Serendipity is essential for growing and scaling our business.
Writing, even if it is for business, still has therapeutic value. Of course, we earn income from our writing as freelance writers, but we also enjoy it when many readers read our content. For example, I know that writers whose content goes viral experience a euphoric state.
I shared glimpses from my decades of business experience that I transferred into my writing practice too. The critical lesson is not writing to earn money but writing to give value to readers. When readers see the value and advocate for your content, then money naturally comes in abundance.
Thank you for reading my perspectives.
I wish you a successful and joyful writing career.
Medium now has a new distribution approach called BOOSTING. If you want to learn more about it, I documented my initial findings, perspectives, and personal experiences in an article presenting it in a checklist format for new writers.
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