How Often Does Tim Denning Publish Stories On Medium
What Medium’s top writer does on the platform can teach us all
Some say Medium is a numbers game. Dr Mehmet Yildiz, the founder of Illumination publication, has mentioned in his blog that this platform favors quantity. It’s no surprise as most social media does that. For example, I tweeted 175 times in September compared to 23 times in the previous month. My tweets’ impression increased by 16 times.
Others say it takes quality to get to more readers.
But a few writers say it takes both. Tim Denning has said that “Quality follows Quantity”. I can attest to that as I believe my writing has improved after I became a regular.
Based on his statement, I was curious to see what Medium’s top writer Tim Denning does.
How often does he publish?
In the month of September, Tim published 37 stories. He also published 39 in August and 40 in July.
On average, he published 1.26 articles per day.
On some days, he even published 5 stories. Of course, there were days when he didn’t publish anything at all. I am not sure if that was by his choice or the delay was caused by publications. He does write for some publications that respond quite slowly (at least to us).
What we can learn here?
Even if you are the best in business, continuous content creation should go on. Yes, Tim will likely continue earning from his existing articles. But he keeps on building. It’s kind of like his asset portfolio. Each story brings in reads today, tomorrow and keeps on giving. For how long is he doing this?
According to him, he has been writing 8 articles per week for 5 years! He is here for the long game and it shows.
What we can learn here?
Getting to his level is no easy feat. It has been the result of high-quality content production, along with continuous and consistent publishing. I personally believe that Medium is at an early stage of the content platform. It will eventually get to unprecedented levels when writers with 100k+ followers would be common. Tim Denning’s subscriber count
Did you know that Tim Denning has almost 200k followers on Medium? That’s more than most of the publications out there.
Whenever we hit publish, those who have subscribed to our posts get a notification or email (based on what they’ve subscribed to). From there, a few come to check out our articles. Imagine if 20% (an arbitrary number) of 200,000 gets the email. That’d mean 40,000 will receive a mail. The average click-through rate for emails is 2.5%. That means 2.5% of 40,000 or 1,000 readers will view that article. And that’s only from his subscriber lists. What if more than 20% have subscribed for email notifications? What if the publication he writes for brings in more readers?
It means that the more often he writes, the more views he will get.
What we can learn?
We need to build our subscriber base and then keep on writing articles. At the same time, we may want to choose for which articles our readers should receive email notifications. I can’t imagine receiving 40 emails in a month from one person and liking that. However, there’s a method behind those numbers
Tim has mostly written for 12 publications. He occasionally self publishes but those are not high in number. All of the publications are very well-known and large publications. They are mostly about similar topics like personal development, investment, marketing, writing, etc. It’s clear that he writes for some niches and he sticks to them.
What we can learn
He has found the homes (pubs) for his stories. We should also find ways to reach readers. Some of us publish through publications. Others like Samra only self publishes or writes through self-owned publications. But they have found their homes. To summarize
Tim has been writing on selected niches and in 12 publications. He keeps on publishing ~40 stories per month and he has been doing that for 5 years.
We must learn this kind of hard work from him. We must also understand that success may take time but we need to keep on putting in hours. And no matter what others say, choosing a few niches doesn’t hurt.