Choosing Writing Advice to Follow

How to Evaluate Writing Advice to Determine Which You Should Take

With all the articles offering writing advice on Medium, it can be tough determining which to try and which to pass by.

There is an enormous amount of advice on Medium about all kinds of topics including Medium itself. You can read about how to become a billionaire, create a startup, quit your job to become a full time writer, strengthen your marriage, invest your money, become a standup comedian, parent difficult children and decide when to get divorced along with hundreds of other topics.

There are also countless articles about succeeding on Medium. In fact, it seems like every writer on the platform publishes at least one Medium advice article and often several. There are even authors that write almost exclusively on the topic, including a monthly article on how much they earned and how many Medium writers earned a certain amount the previous month.

Part of what contributes to the large number of Medium advice posts is the difference in earnings between different writers. With it not being uncommon for writers to report their monthly earnings and other stats, and for Medium to post monthly updates on the percentage of writers who earned over $100, the community is aware of the differences that exist. Because of this, many writers strive to learn how the more successful writers achieve their success.

Unfortunately, this has taken on a life of its own. With new writers and even more established writers constantly looking for sure fire ways to succeed on Medium, a lot of writers feel that one way to succeed is simply to write articles about Medium. While there are a number of posts that are well written for the genuine purpose of helping other writers, there are plenty of others that don’t fulfill what their titles promise or which are just clickbait and don’t really provide anything of value.

At this point there are so many Medium advice articles that promise they’ll teach you the secrets to earning a lot of money from Medium or otherwise succeed on the platform, that they often overlap.Often there are articles that present the same information with just a different titles.

In addition to the obvious problem of people misleading readers for their own benefit, there is another issue as well. New writers will read these articles that promise to teach them the strategies that will guarantee positive outcomes. When they follow the steps suggested the expected result doesn’t occur, it can discourage them or make them believe that they just don’t have what it takes to succeed.

I’m not trying to suggest that people not continue to write about what they want on Medium. That’s for everyone to decide on their own and if others want to read all these articles then they’ll continue to be written whether they’re useful or not.

But the question is, how do you know which ones to pay attention to? I think the answer to this is fairly easy if you remain flexible about what you read. The key to benefitting from Medium advice articles is to recognize a few things.

1. Not everything works for everyone so even if an article is widely popular, not all of it, and perhaps none of it, may actually be helpful to you. This isn’t a reflection on you. It should just be a reminder that you are an individual with your own unique needs and ways of doing things.
2. Don’t assume that just because you see the same advice over and over again that it is automatically good advice. It may just be that a lot of authors see that similar articles receiving a lot of engagement and so they rewrite the same advice in different words. The number of times a piece of advice is given doesn’t indicate how effective it is.
3. Determining which advice is useful doesn’t depend on who wrote it or how successful they are. What works for each of us is different. You may find that there is a piece of advice given by another brand new writer that addresses your needs better and is worded in a way that allows you to implement it.
4. Beware posts that are one size fits all. These are the articles that present advice as if it is a proven fact that you must do what it says to be successful. For example, you must write every day, you must publish at least two stories a day, never spend more than 30 minutes on a post, you must/mustn’t write in a niche etc. All of this advice has helped some people or they wouldn’t be saying it, but it is not the only way to succeed and it may not be the way for you to do so.
5. The atmosphere on Medium is such that that usually the comments left on a story are positive and reinforcing. It’s not the type of platform where you will find a lot of constructive criticism or people weighing in on something that didn’t work for them. Just because an article has tons of positive comments doesn’t mean you aren’t a good writer if the advice didn’t work for you. I always find it helpful when this is the case to see how someone may have adopted a strategy or found something that might be related but not quite the same thing.

When all is said and done, deciding on which suggestions to follow from the large body of articles that offer Medium advice, like everything worthwhile, takes a bit of work. There are some things that can help you decide which techniques to incorporate into your own writing toolbox.

Before reading anyone else’s advice, first become familiar with your own preferences and needs. Think about which styles of work are most comfortable for you. Consider what has helped you be successful at school or at your job. How does your mood play into what makes you more or less productive and what contributes to different moods when you are writing? Do you work better with a long lead time or when waiting to the last minute? Are you a planner or a pantser? Where have you gotten ideas for projects before? These are all things that can influence how useful different types of strategies will be for you.

When reading Medium advice articles skim them first to make sure they aren’t one of the puff pieces that doesn’t actually provide any practical, easy to follow suggestions. You can then go back and read it more thoroughly if it seems worthwhile. This way you don’t waste a lot of time reading through the articles that don’t have strategies that might help you.

When starting out on Medium and looking for guidelines, first techniques that make the most sense to you that you feel match your style of working and your preferences and that you easily understand. After you have some of this in place, select techniques that seem logical even if you might not have automatically tried them on your own.

Finally, once you have established some momentum and have attracted a group of followers, pick a different technique to try every so often that you may not think coincides perfectly with your style of preferences just to see if there are other things that might help you expand your reach and your writing satisfaction.

Once you start putting suggestions in place, the only way to really know how effective they are is to keep a record of the data related to their outcomes. How does participation in facebook groups affect your articles’ performance? What style of writing seems to get the best response from readers? What time of the day seems to be the best for you to publish articles? How does scheduling influence your stats? What publications seem to get you the most engagement and how often do you need to publish in each to maintain readers’ interest in your work? Does including a bio help?

If you’re like many other Medium writers, you are busy with everything that goes into publishing on the platform. When you have written a number of articles, the only way to answer these questions and keep track of the performance of different posts is to keep a record and analyze the results of each new technique that you try.

The most important thing, however, about deciding which advice to take is to trust yourself to know what feels right and what makes sense for you. You are the expert on how you function best. This means that only you can determine which path will lead you to discovering how to achieve the happiest, most satisfying and most successful writing life possible.

Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had work featured in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press & Zero Fiction among others. Her poetry has been featured in several anthologies including Untimely Frost among others. She is Editor for 1-One-Infinity, The Partnered Pen & One Table, One World and is Editor in Chief for Promposity & Mental Gecko. She is also the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications.

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