How I Managed to Publish an Article a Day on Medium for Almost a Year
At the time of writing, I’ve published 313 articles on Medium. I’m publishing one a day, so I’ve been at this pace for almost a year now.
I’m not going to hide from you the fact that it’s a pretty tough rhythm to keep up, and that I’ve had to put in place a few tricks in order to achieve it, which I’m going to talk about in this article.
The Challenges of Publishing 1 Article/Day
It may seem like a simple matter to sit down at your computer for 30 minutes and write, but that’s not the case at all.
First of all, of course, you have to be organized in order to have the time to write. As far as I’m concerned, it takes 1 hour on average to write an article. I already have too many things on my plate to devote 1 hour a day to writing.
Then you have to come up with ideas. Personally, I’m interested in a lot of things and I do a lot of research, but it’s still sometimes hard to come up with ideas. So I imagine that for someone who only writes about one subject and doesn’t necessarily have much inspiration, it’s just impossible to come up with 1 article a day for 1 year.
You also have to avoid duplicating articles. It may sound silly to you, but when you’ve written 300 articles, you can’t remember everything. After all, it’s not such a problem to write a duplicate article, but while you’re at it, I think it’s better to avoid it.
Finally, you need to index your articles. When you have 10 articles, there’s no problem navigating, and your readers can find them all easily. But when you have 300, they’re not going to enjoy scrolling endlessly until they’ve seen them all.
Finding Time to Write
To find time to write, review your time scale. Use a weekly scale rather than a daily one. If it takes you 1 hour to write an article, don’t say to yourself “I have to write 1 hour a day”, but rather “I have to write 7 hours a week”.
On top of that, you’ll be more productive if you write 3 articles in a row, rather than 1 article a day for 3 days. This is the principle of Deep Work: to reach a state of deep concentration, you need to focus on the same task for several hours.
So it’s best to pick two or three days in the week during which you’ll write all your upcoming articles.
Planning
Perhaps even more important than the previous point, I recommend that you plan your articles. Make a list of what you’re going to publish, get a calendar, and on each day put the name of the article you plan to publish.
This will give you an overview of the articles you plan to publish, and also help you organize yourself so you know if you need to write certain articles before others.
I used to do this in a calendar (know more here), but now I use NocoDB to store my articles. It works in the same way as Airtable, i.e. it’s a mix between a spreadsheet and a database.
I assign each article a publication date and a status (published, to schedule, “idea”, canceled…).
Then, for each article, I check “Action Item Created” if I have created the TODO related to the article. I don’t create all the TODOs when I’m scheduling the articles because I can’t plan my TODOs too much in advance.
Doing this also allows you to have an overview of your articles, and easily know if you have already written a given article.
Finding Ideas
First, before finding ideas, it’s important to find a way to store them before you forget them. Simply because it’s not often possible, and certainly not optimal, to write an article right at the moment you have an idea. So you have to store them.
For me, I store them in NocoDB. As I said before, I have a “status” field that allows me to tag articles as ideas.
As you can see, I have a lot of Raspberry Pi related ideas stored here, and it leads us to the first point in finding ideas: just take what you’ve already written and find related articles.
Even better, you can write series of articles, this way you already know that you will write many articles about the same subject, multiplying your articles opportunities. That’s what I do, for example, I’ve written a data science series that is composed of something like 20 articles.
Another tip to find ideas is just to be curious and interested in a lot of subjects. It’s obvious that you won’t be able to write 300 articles about the same subject, but if you pick 10 fields or subjects, it seems easier to write 30 articles for each subject.
Indexing your Articles
It’s very important to index your articles for several reasons.
First, for the user experience of your readers. If they’re interested in your articles, they may want to read others you’ve written, but if they see that you’ve published 500 of them and they have to scroll for 5 minutes to see them all, they just won’t do it, or it won’t be pleasant.
Secondly, to make your articles live over time. If your older articles are properly indexed, they get almost as much visibility as the ones you’ve just published. They don’t fall into oblivion.
This also allows you to take advantage of the compounding effect. Let’s take an example: for a year, you write one article a day. Even if your articles don’t earn you much, let’s say $0.20 a day, after a year you’ll have 365 of them, i.e. $73 a day because all of them are still visible and they can be found easily by your readers (it doesn’t really work like that, I’m not earning $60 a day with 300 articles, it’s for the example).
Now, you have several ways to index your articles. The easiest way is to use lists. However, I don’t like lists (I will say why in another article), so I create “index articles”, i.e. articles where I just put links to other articles. I sometimes have several levels of index articles. For example, I can have an index article entitled “Programming”, then in this article we find a link to another index article entitled “Python”, then links to articles corresponding to series indexes, and finally links to articles of the series. Maybe it seems complicated, but just check by yourself how I’ve done it: start here, and you can access all my content in no more than 3 clicks.
Moreover, indexing your articles is a way to find duplicates, because if your navigation system is consistent when you index a duplicate, you will finally arrive at a page where there already is an article talking about the same thing.
Final Note
With these tips, I managed to write more than 300 articles in less than a year. And I’m still keeping this rhythm! I don’t know how long it will last but for now, I like writing so many articles, and I hope I will continue to write 1 article a day for my second year on Medium.
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