WRITING TIPS
Dear Pinned Articles, You’re Blocking Readers Getting Through
Break the chain and become free-flowing again
Some people call me Piree, I call myself Poirot.
That’s because there’s only so much you can tell about a person by reading one article. So I play detective by exploring people’s profiles and working out what really makes them tick.
There are itty-bitty clues everywhere, starting way before I even click on an article to read it.
A writer’s profile is a great CLUE, so it’s such a shame so many writers clog up their profile with old pinned articles!
I don’t mean one or two pinned articles because that’s not clogging, that’s a handy short-cut.
I mean five or six pinned articles, presumably meant to represent the “Best Of” that writer, but just winds the reader up and they go read someone else instead.
Detectives are dying through over-scrolling!
Everyone here comes to write (and read because his holiness, Ev, expects writers to be readers too, it’s how the current Medium model works [and will work until they introduce ads]) and for writers to get their best stories in front of readers (who are mostly also writers), well, that’s paramount. God, I love punctuation.
So writers pin their best stuff to their profile and because none of us writes total shite, everything ends up getting pinned and nothing’s special anymore.
Writers end up with a plastic profile that’s botoxed up with articles that never change!
Writers are setting up a “fool me once” situation without even knowing it! Readers don’t want to scroll over botox, they want the fresh stuff because readers are all detectives like me!
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me
Readers want to know who you are.
Today. Not last month or last year or whenever those pins are from.
The Piree Poirot Method of Detecting Who You Are
When I’m going through a profile to gather my intel about a writer, here’s what I’m looking for:
- How often you write — I don’t want the heartache of loving you if you stopped writing (mentioning no names, Seth Godin — check out his follower count! Little lost lambs, follow me instead! Seth doesn’t write here no more!) Thankfully Seth doesn’t pin! Pinned articles have no date, I can’t tell when it was written unless I click into it and then if I find it was a year ago, I’ll feel cheated!
- The topics you write about — Crypto, say no more, meta-big-M, oh yes, give me more! A long list of pinned articles skews first impressions.
- Your headlines! — I flounder with headlines so I want to see what you do with yours and I want your latest! Not something you patched together when you first started here and were as bad as me! If you’ve still got your early articles pinned, you’re making me cry!
- Where you publish — I’m a proper baby when it comes to publishing in other publications! It’s a control thing. Seeing where you publish is my equivalent of an agoraphobe learning to step outside. Don’t tease me by pinning an article in a defunct publication!
- How you space out your topics — Most writers write about a variety of topics and I want to see how you space it all out. It gives me a lovely insight into what’s important to you and once I get that, I feel you, babe!
- How you write — I like to click on lovely headlines and check out your style. I don’t care about typos or grammar, I care about your thoughts and your heart. Pinned articles try to force me to read something I probably (definitely) don’t want to.
When you pin a long list of old articles, you throw out my intel. I lose my sense of who you are. It’s like there’s a big wall in front of me and who knows if it reaches all the way to China.
Best stop scrolling! Find someone else to explore instead.
Would you eat microwaved frozen food in a fine-dining restaurant?
A long list of pinned stories is like a microwaved meal.
No-one knows when they were made or what’s so special about them that they have to be pinned.
What’s special to the writer (we all write sparkling gems) is not always special to the reader.
If there’s a long list of pinned articles to scroll through, the reader will give up long before they make it down to your fresh stuff.
“About-Me” stories are always fresh!
About-me stories are like eavesdropping into the psyche of a writer. They’re each as individual as the people writing them… the self-conscious, the woebegone, the formal, the sincere, the quirky, the super-cool…
Poirot is a master eavesdropper — he’d approve of About Pages… and maybe even a pinned listicle pointing to other stories too.
Two pinned articles is the magic number (for me). Two frozen meals! Then I want to see them fresh and dated!
Pinned stories interfere with the Piree Poirot Method of detection. Dates are all hidden, the publications you posted in may no longer exist, the info could be dated, your style might have changed… Pinned articles are cold case.
Exception! Unless it’s a writer I already know and can forgive them their trespasses as they forgive me when I trespass against them. We’re all hypocrites at some level. lol
But that’s me. What about you?
- What do you do when you come across a long list of pinned articles?
- Are you a pinner?
- What kinds of pins do you like?
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