Medium Royalty
What Makes Zulie Rane One of the Most Successful Writers on Medium?
A look into the strategy of 3 of Medium’s best accounts.
Building a brand is one of the most important parts of building an online following. For most brands, they focus on their visual aspects: color palettes, fonts, art style, etc.
As writers, we have less flexibility with our branding.
One of the most important parts of your brand as a writer is the style you write in. No, I’m not talking about your tone or voice. Instead, I mean the way you format your articles.
To explain this concept, we’re going to take a look at the styles of three successful writers in three different niches. Each of these writers are mammoths on Medium with distinct writing styles.
Today we’ll look at:
- Robin Wilding — 14.6k followers
- Zulie Rane — 159k followers
- Eve Arnold — 70k followers
*While I include screenshots of their work, I have blurred the text to make it unreadable. If you want to read the articles mentioned, please visit the links included.
Robin Wilding
Robin has explicitly said she focuses on creating a familiar visual style for her readers. Her niche is humor, meaning she writes on a wide variety of topics.
To maintain a sense of familiarity, all of Robin’s articles are written in a similar format.
Robin’s Style
- Frequent format changes to break up text
- Adding extra jokes into picture captions
- Using a picture every 300–500 words
- Variety in paragraph lengths
Robin’s articles contain a lot of white space.
New writers often join Medium and write in a book-like format, meaning: long paragraphs full of long paragraphs. This format works well for books, but this is the internet. Your competition is Tik-Tok.
Do you think your long blocks of text can compete with TikTok?
Probably not.
When writing on Medium, creating space between your text is absolutely essential.
Zulie Rane
Zulie is a Medium veteran. At 159k followers, Zulie’s niche is Zulie herself.
She has done the work to build a brand and a loyal following. When we read Zulie’s work, it is because Zulie wrote it.
With that said, Zulie’s writing is much more serious and professional than Robin’s fart jokes. Thus, her style is more serious and professional. Even still, Zulie does not write in a book-like format.
Zulie’s Style
- Sections of equal length
- Variety in paragraph lengths
- Using formatting options to break up text
Though Zulie’s paragraphs tend to be longer than Robin’s, they’re never longer than 5 sentences.
Zulie cares about creating visual balance in her work. Her sections are about the same length, and she balances long paragraphs with shorter ones. She doesn’t use nearly as many images as Robin does, but the images she uses have a more unified theme.
In addition, Zulie doesn’t lean so much on format changes to break up text. This makes sense. It wouldn’t fit the clean and polished brand she’s created.
Eve Arnold
While Robin and Zulie have very broad niches, Eve writes in a super specific sub-niche: how to be a part-time online creator alongside a normal 9–5.
Eve’s 70k followers prove the efficacy of her niching strategy. It took her a few years to gain her following, but now her followers are extremely loyal.
Part of Eve’s brand is her niche. Her topics are not necessarily predictable, but she is strict with her branding. She doesn’t stray too far outside of her super specific sub-niche.
Eve’s Style
- Super specific sub-niche
- Short, balanced sections
- Using format changes for emphasis
Since Zulie is self-niched, it makes sense she prefers images of women who look like her. Similarly, since Eve is sub-niched, it makes sense she’d prefer more diverse images.
Zulie writes what resonates with her. While she writes with others in mind, her main focus is writing for herself. Eve, on the other hand, focuses on writing for others. On Eve’s part, it is a smart branding move to use images that represent a wider variety of people.
Eve also has a pretty consistent color palette.
The tone of the mustard yellow in her profile picture is a tone she repeats in many of her featured images.
The 3 Formatting Laws
These three women are successful in three very different niches. The stylistic choices they have in common show us what works on Medium overall.
- Variety in paragraph lengths.
- Use format changes to break up text.
- Balanced section lengths.
Consider these three choices the meat and potatoes of your Medium branding. While you can add whatever other side dishes you’d like, using these three style choices is the secret formula to success on Medium.
What’s the alternative? Well, text like this:
After seeing the beautiful and polished styles of Robin, Zulie, and Eve, I’m sure you can see just how important formatting is.
Creating a brand style is an art. Medium’s readers are not here for book writing. Don’t serve them book writing.
Ask yourself this: Can your article compete with TikTok?
If it can’t, it’s time to work on your formatting.
My Question For You
Do you currently have a formatting style? How would you define it?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for reading!
If you’d like to maximize your growth as efficiently as possible, sign up for my free 5-day email course here. I’d love to help you become the best writer you can be.
