Don’t Be Stupid — Post Your Words on More Than One Platform
Make the content creation platforms compete for us (the writers)
You can write on Medium! You can write on Quora! You can write on LinkedIn! On WordPress! On Vocal! On Newsbreak! On Revue! And on Substaaaaaaaack!
YOU CAN WRITE ON ALL THE THINGS!
YAAY!!!
Ahem… Sorry, let me try that again.
Some people claim it’s the Golden age for writers — the age in which there are more places where you can write than ever before. But that’s sort of like saying it’s the Golden age for ass wipers because there are more baby butts than ever before.
It’s not the fact that you can write on countless online platforms that makes this an exciting time full of opportunities. After all, you only have so much time in a day. It’s the fact that you can write once and then publish on countless platforms. It’s like wiping once and getting all butts clean. That’s the crucial point. You can repurpose and republish everywhere to increase your chances that your stories will take off somewhere.
It’s like buying one lottery ticket and then being able to claim the jackpot in every country where your numbers happen to come up.
Loyalty isn’t rewarded
When I first started out writing online, I told myself I’d go all-in on one creator platform. I thought being loyal to that platform would somehow be rewarded. But I’m thinking more and more that this is delusional.
No platform really cares about you. No engineer tinkering with the recommender algorithm is aware of you, let alone thinking of you. And the same is true when decisions are made in board meetings.
Billionaires steer their platforms in one direction or another totally indifferent to what that might mean to you specifically. That means if platforms won’t be loyal to you, you shouldn’t be saying “I, a budding writer, take you, dear Medium/Substack/whatever, to be my wedded writing platform, to be faithful to you until we are parted by death.” It means you should be promiscuous with your writing — as philandering as an adulterer who snorts crushed Viagra pills for breakfast.
Platform promiscuity has no downsides
None of the writing platforms I’m aware of asks for exclusivity. You own your words and you can publish them all over the place. And that’s why you should.
Remember, you’re not some writer equivalent of effing Joe Rogan — someone who can cash in on an exclusive deal. You’re some dirty unwashed pitiful nobody. That means having your words on multiple platforms only has upsides for you.
“But wait,” you say, “I’m earning a few pennies on one platform. Won’t I drive traffic away from that platform if I publish my words elsewhere?”
No, you won’t — at least not until you strike gold and become more popular than dildos. Until then, you’re not driving traffic anywhere. No crowd of people is going to abandon one platform and go to another just for you. Readers are on their platform of choice and they’ll stay there, regardless of where else they could in principle find your content too.
Platform promiscuity is the easiest way to double, triple, or quadruple your audience
You might be bitching all about how hard it is to get a mere 100 views on any one of your stories. And you might be racking your brain about how to increase that number. You might be thinking about headlines, your formatting, your voice, your niche, etc. Maybe, you think, if I tweak a few of those elements, I’ll get more views. Or maybe I just have to write two, three, or four times as much…
But you know what? You don’t have to do much of anything. Just go to one of your articles, copy it, and paste it as a new article somewhere else. Boom! Bam! Explosive fart! You’ve just increased your audience.
Platform promiscuity will make you feel less frustrated
Spending hours, days, weeks, and months creating one story after the other and then seeing each one of them dying, neglected by readers and algorithms, can be deeply demotivating. It also makes you feel like you’ve entered the mother of all rat races: put out content every week, every day, every hour — no! every f*cking minute! — just to remain visible and raking in some views. After all, if a piece has a shelf life of mere days, the only way to keep getting views is by constantly putting out new stuff.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t decide to become a writer to feed some algorithmic monster that constantly demands fresh content — a monster that has never heard of evergreen stories and just thinks that anything older than a week must be rotten and infested with maggots and flies.
But you know what? If you’ve been feeding the monster on one platform for a year or two, you probably have a few hundred dead stories. And unless you are just writing about trending topics and news, you can probably give most of them a new life by just republishing them elsewhere — by feeding the monster living on another platform. And feeding that new beast will be no hassle at all. Just take the stories from your rotting archive — the stories that are being neglected by the old monster — and feed them to the new one. It’s easy and, more importantly, knowing that the content you’ve been writing for years still has some life in it feels better than a long piss.
What about SEO?
Okay, I must admit that SEO is the one thing you have to take into account when republishing your work on more than one platform — at least if you’re betting on getting most of your views from search traffic. But more likely than not, your articles are sitting on the freaking last page of Google. So you probably don’t have to worry about screwing up your search-engine optimization since Google and the rest don’t give two flying frogs about your articles anyway.
And if you do get significant Google traffic, then why on earth are you reading me? You are probably one of the big boys and should be telling us how you’re making Google’s nipples all hard.
Moreover, if you’re really worried about screwing up your SEO, look into canonical links, i.e., links that inform Google that the words on one platform are a legitimate copy of the words on another — and not some shady plagiarism.
Wrapping up
[D]istribute your content eggs among as many baskets as you can. Go to Substack and Newsbreak. In the end, if we sit back silently and allow ourselves to be exploited, that’s exactly what the content creation platforms are going to do.
So, take your pitchforks and FIGHT BACK!!! Make the platforms compete for YOUR ATTENTION!!!
Ahem, I mean, be smart and publish your work on more than one platform. You never know — what didn’t get any traction here may become wildly successful elsewhere. Also, encouraging competition between platforms is good for everyone.
