Writing and Marketing
How to Become a Top Writer on Medium in Three Months
A video presentation summarising critical points in an article by Dr. Mehmet Yildiz
I am a new writer on Medium coming from media background. I joined Medium two months ago.
However, I earned my first top writer badge in social media tag in my first month and gratefully gained around 1K followers, qualifying me for Medium Partner Program.
Nevertheless, I am still inexperienced on Medium. Therefore, I am not able to provide writing advice at this stage.
Keeping this fact in mind, I review the work of top writers and learn a lot from my mentors, especially from Dr Mehmet Yildiz, who generously mentors me in his scarce time.
As a token of his free service, I offer my service to support his publication’s YouTube channel as a coordinator. He believes that reciprocal engagements are essential for the growth of content developers. I agree.
After this brief background, I’d like to introduce a video I designed and posted on YouTube today. Since I learned interesting facts from an article by Dr Yildiz titled How To Become A Top Writer In Three Months, I summarised it and created a short video presentation out of it.
I hope you enjoy this four-minute video and find it valuable for your writing journey. I also attached the script for those who don’t have access to YouTube.
Transcript of the Video
Dear Subscribers,
Previously, I created a video about writing viral stories as it was one of the most desirable cases by freelance writers and bloggers. When I asked Dr Mehmet Yildiz, chief editor of Illumination Integrated Publications, what is the next important point, he said how to become a top writer quickly.
I noticed that he also published an article guiding writers on Medium to be a top writer in three months. So I followed his advice and gained a top writer badge in my first month of joining Medium.
Dr Yildiz has helped hundreds of writers to become top writers since 2019. As he has the practical experience and documented it, I decided to share his insights in a summary form focusing on the critical points.
His first key point is understanding the importance of the tags, as the use of tags is a determining factor in gaining a top writer status in a specific tag or topic. Medium algorithms use the assigned tags to choose top writer badges.
From his observations, stories were chosen for distribution and getting high engagement rates usually show at the top of a specific tag page.
So if your stories show on the tag pages, they might be discovered by readers who follow those tags. My understanding is Medium has around 70 tags associated with top writer badges.
I will add the list to the description and transcript of my story.
The fastest way to become a top writer on a specific topic is to have a viral story on certain topics. So, if our story goes viral and we have five tags in the story, we might gain five top writer badges.
A single viral story can make us a top writer quickly. As my previous video has guided writing viral stories, I will skip those points in this video. You can watch the video linked in the description section.
The next important point is writing consistently. We need to write and post almost every day. If we write a story a day, we have around 30 stories a month, and if we post two stories, we will get 60 articles.
So the point is 60 stories make more impact on the visibility of our profile. Some top writers post three and five stories a day. Instead of posting a 1500 words single story, you might post three stories with 500 words that can reach a broader audience to increase reading times and bring new followers and readers.
Readers prefer shorter and sharper stories with practical takeaway points from our observations.
For beginners, increasing followers is essential. The critical point is to convert our followers to regular readers. Our meaningful engagement with readers might increase the chance of influencing them to be regular readers. Dr Yildiz recommends asking three questions when posting an article.
First, does this story solve a problem for my readers? Second, does the story entertain my readers? Third, does this story inform them? He guided building our audience and subscribers, which I link in the description section. Based on his experience, he believes that subscribers can produce 50 times better results than followers.
His next suggestion is to amplify our stories using short-form stories frequently. Short-form stories are easy and effective because readers prefer them for various reasons.
Please keep in mind that the purpose of short-form stories is not to earn income but to gain exposure. They capture readers’ interest and encourage them to check our long-form stories. I provide a link to how to create short-form stories on Medium.
His next suggestion is to participate in writing prompts and challenges. I provide links to recent prompts and challenges offered by our publications in the description section. The most famous one is the 100-day challenge for new writers. Many writers who completed this challenge have become top writers in three months.
Even though everyone can self-publish, adding our stories to publications can bring us more readers by increasing the chance of being discovered by the follower of a specific publication. Different publications have different audiences.
His last point is sharing links to our stories on multiple social media sites. Our publications have several social media platforms that I will add to the description section.
The intelligent use of social media can bring new readers to our content. The more readers, the more reading time our stories gain. More reading time can get more top writer badges.
As you can see, these are not just theoretical points. They are practical and doable. I hope you find these tips helpful.
I wish you good luck in your efforts. Thank you for watching this video. Please subscribe to our channel to be notified of informative and instructive videos that we post.
End of Transcript
Related Articles by Dr Mehmet Yildiz
I reviewed the attached articles that helped me increase my readers in such a short time. Dr. Yildiz posted these articles to guide the writers contributing to his publications on Medium. Most of his proteges became top writers.
I featured nine top writers from Medium on YouTube: Bill Abbate, Karen Madej, Julius Evans, Dr. Preeti Singh, Shashi Sastry, Lawson Wallace, Arlo Hennings, Ph.D., Dr Michael Heng, and Carla Woody. You can find the videos in the story below.
If you missed my previous article and video about writing viral articles and blogs, I link the story here.
I also write about gaming and computer games. I plan to share my gaming experience in my upcoming articles. Here is my first post about the review of five great video games I regularly play.
Another important activity for me on Medium is to run I publication I created recently with the help of Dr Mehmet Yildiz. It is named Illumination on YouTube. If you are into YouTube, creating and reviewing videos, you may join my publication by requesting writer access via this weblink. Please mention your Medium ID. To add you to our YouTube channel, you need to provide the email address that you log in to YouTube.
Invitation to my Gaming and YouTube Publications
I am an editor of two publications on Medium.
One is for YouTubers, and another one is for gamers.
If you are interested in these topics, I look forward to hosting your stories and promoting them.
Here are the invitations providing the scope of publications and details to join.
1 — Invitation to Write for ILLUMINATION on YouTube Publication
2 — Invitation: Join ILLUMINATION Gaming Publication as a Writer
Writer applications can be sent via this weblink.
Here is a collection including my videos introducing our top writers.
Sample Gaming Stories In My Collection
Logitech G and Tencent Games Announces Handheld Cloud Gaming Console
Stray Is a Wholesome Cat Adventure Game We Didn’t Know We Needed
Finally, I Read and Heard Interesting Rumors About Grand Theft Auto 6.
High on Life: The Upcoming Game Set in the Rick & Morty Universe
Recent Stories on Other Topics
Connection
I post informative articles in my field covering gaming, film-making, media, and design. You can subscribe to my account to get notifications when I post on Medium. I also support Illumination Integrated Publications as an editor.
Thank you for reading my stories and watching the videos. I look forward to collaborating with you. I can be contacted at Illumination Slack workspace. I use the same ID (Illumination YouTube Coordinator) on Slack.
I also joined Twitter and LinkedIn recently to amplify stories that I read and publish daily.
