avatarEve Arnold

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How (Not) to Quit Your Job And Write Online

My last 3 years

Photo by Ali Pazani on Unsplash

“Quit your 9-to-5, move to Bali, and build the life of your dreams”

That was, in a nutshell, the message the algo kept serving me up on Medium, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn — anywhere (everywhere).

One teeny-tiny problem…

I had a mortgage (and a family) right here in the UK.

For three years, I was stuck, dreaming about who I could be but never taking action on it. I lived in this perpetual loop of constant unhappiness with knowing what I actually wanted.

Until I realized something about my day job...

For the last nine years, running experiments have been part of my working life.

At university I studied Biomedical Science (full of experimentation) and post-university, I found my fit in Product and Service Design which is essentially running a startup inside a big business.

Today experimentation is my job.

For three years I’ve used experiments as a cornerstone of my strategy of writing on the internet.

It turned into my thesis for building on the internet:

Build → Measure → Learn.

You see there isn’t one strategy that will work for anyone but there is one methodology that can be applied to anyone’s journey.

It’s *exactly* how I went about building my audience on Medium… I’ll walk you through the highlights:

Here’s the high-level overview:

Step 1: Plan

First, ask yourself what are you trying to achieve.

An article that aims to resonate and explore a detailed idea will likely get less engagement but build more trust with your audience.

An article that has broad appeal (not too broad) will attract more people, and might gain more followers so if you’re trying to grow, focus effort there.

Step 2: Hypothesis

A hypothesis is a prediction between two variables (a testable statement) for example: if the lights are green, the cars will move.

You want to make sure you’re accurately testing your ideas, not just looking at the data in hindsight and seeing what worked.

For a new Medium article, here are some hypotheses I’ve tested in the past:

  • Writing a ‘timestamped’ introduction (‘In 2023’) will get more reads compared to my control.
  • A listicle with odd numbers gets more engagement than a listicle with even numbers.
  • Pictures of faces get more claps than images of laptop setups.

I then run the tests and see what happens.

Step 3: Test & Measure

This is the hard bit. If you want to get meaningful data that you can use to iterate your writing, you need to get out there and write.

You must write enough to test frequently and get data that shapes your future content principles and strategy.

An important part of testing is your measurables. For articles, those measurables are claps, reads, and comments. For your website that might be opt-in rates, for your newsletter it might be open-rates. Allocating a measurable and testing against it can then be used to drive your decision-making.

Here are some examples of tests and measures I’ve run in the past:

  • Headline wording change* — measure: Medium earnings
  • Self-publishing vs. Publication — measure: claps and comments
  • Writing x5 a week in comparison to x7 times a week — measure: Medium Earnings

*Explored more in Medium Blueprint headline A/B test section.

To get a good sample, tests sometimes run with multiple articles (one variable multiple times), across multiple weeks. But even running a single test with one article is a good way to get an indication of what works.

Step 4: Review

Once you’ve run your test, you can come back after the test has ended to see what is working. I usually run tests for 7 days but you can see the data pretty quickly after a few on Medium.

The review aims to understand if your hypothesis is correct, if it is, you can take that to form part of your content strategy. If it worked, add it to your list of principles, if it flopped, bin it.

Considering the execution and the time it takes to write an article are the same, it’s a no-brainer to keep running tests to see what works.

To build your thing without quitting the day job, join 18,000+ creators in the part-time creator club. Get more guides at: The Part-Time Creator Club.

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