All The Bad Advice That’s Keeping You Poor On Medium
Stop being desperate, start being original!
This is a rant, no doubt about it. Writers here will either hate me for it or love me to bits for it, but will not stay indifferent. This is the article that once you start reading, you’re unlikely to ignore. I am pissed off beyond pissed off, and I am trying to channel that energy into something positive, something that will help at least one other writer, but I will put zero effort into doing that with gloves on. It’s all gloves off in this one, and if I hit a nerve, then so be it. Know that it comes from a good place. End of disclaimer.
For brevity, I’ll make this a list. A punchy one. Bam, bam, bam! Proverbial teeth will fly, ribs will crack and muscles might contract in agony in places one didn’t know they had them, and there’s no way around it. Follow me or block me, I don’t care, and that’s actually a perfect segue into the first bad advice.
- Write to your audience. Absolutely not. As a new writer, you have no idea who your audience is, or if you even have one. You also shouldn’t care about all that, especially not at the beginning. If you write, so people follow you, you’re not carving out yourself an audience, you’re tainting your stories from the get-go by trying to please as many readers as possible. I want your stuff to be different, genuinely different!
- Write every day. Why in God’s name would you do that? Do you have original, read-worthy ideas every day? If so, yes, do it, but I see what people write who write every day, and most of it is a waste of internet bandwidth. Spare yourself the embarrassment three years down the line reading back all the inept nonsense and explaining to a big non-Medium publication why you did that.
- Write short-form because it makes money. It doesn’t. You’ll see a bunch of marketers flashing around their credentials claiming otherwise, but look closer and their best-performing story made $80 over its lifetime. That’s worse than peanuts.
- Don’t write long-form because it doesn’t make money. I bloody disagree. Articles as long as 10 minutes can rake in cash like crazy, the only requirement is to be original and have a real voice.
- You need a profitable niche. YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch have already proven this theory wrong. Finance and tech folks aren’t the only ones raking in the doll-hairs ($$$) at the end of every month. The weirdest of niches are popular because guess what? No human is unique. Not unique enough not to fall into a large category of people who enjoy the same shtuff. Unboxing shite on camera wasn’t a profitable niche until UnboxTherapy made it so. Niches get created all the time. Create your own.
- Consistency matters. Biggest red herring ever. Keep writing terrible content consistently, every day, twice a day, and you’ll see no one will care. Write occasionally, when you feel like it, great content, readers will come back and read everything you wrote, even your rants.
- Write about popular topics, topical right now. To what end? So that a month later, nobody even views your stories? Sure, a few here and there is fine, but you can’t build a writing business on articles that lose value in just a few short weeks.
- You need to write more, quantity is key. Dead wrong. With the best of intentions, you’re only going to create noise. Readers are tired of the noise, soulless nonsense, the mundane. You need to write less, write smarter and hone a style based on who you are, and how you see the world.
- Keep writing, you’ll get there. Or… you may very well not! Consider that you may be terrible at writing, that your voice is not meant to be expressed in words. Of course, give it a good ol’ college try, but if you see it going nowhere, stop wasting your time, your talent clearly lies elsewhere.
Maybe all of this is hard to swallow, perhaps for the first time, it really puts things into perspective. Or maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps you decide taking my advice into consideration is not for you. I honestly, don’t care whichever way you go, as long as you carve your own path organically based on who you are. Prove me wrong out of spite, that works too.
Either way, stop spending time reading conflicting advice and start honing your writing skills, developing the author in you because people will ultimately come here to read you, and when you’ll have 20K followers people will read whatever you write because they like you and your view on life regardless of niche, regardless of story-length, topic or even whether you’re right or not.
Half the articles I read are from authors I follow.
Half the time I disagree with them, but I still follow them because they provide value to the reader in me, and as a writer, my only rule is to provide value back. In my own words, my own unapologetic style, from my perspective, and that’s what makes my writing mine and mine alone. That’s the promise I make to every follower and subscriber. So should you.
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!
