Invest in Your Medium Content Shop

If you write consistently and grow it for a decade, you will be like Walmart.

I’m the son of a shopkeeper. And I think writing on Medium is like shopkeeping. Your readers are your customers. Your stories are your inventory. And the good news is that your inventory never diminishes. Each article you write is an asset. Good content is like a golden egg-laying goose— it keeps on giving.

Reflecting on my shopkeeping experiences

I was born in a small town called Ivrindi in Turkey. My father was a shop keeper in this town. When I was a child, I used to help my father in the shop.

It was boring to wait for customers in the grocery shop at times. I would often daydream, write, or nap on the back of Marlboro cartoons. I remember calculating the profits that we would get from each product line we sold. It was profitable to design and create our own product bundles, for example. However, selling cigarettes or gums were not profitable.

Shopkeeping is a game I played during my childhood, but the lessons I learned about customers, business, and life have always stayed with me. I learned how to communicate with customers, organize the shelves, order products, and keep track of money.

Your Medium is your shop

I have just started writing for Medium this year. I have written about 130 articles since the Coronavirus lockdown. Let’s view each article as a product. Whenever a reader comes and reads the article, you can consider it a sale. If you provide a good reading experience, your readers will be satisfied and they will follow you.

My Medium shop is open. I have about 145 articles on my shelves. The amazing thing about the Medium shop is the following: When you have a sale, your inventory is not diminished. Thousands of people can read your article and your article is still on the shelves. In fact, the more reads, the merrier.

My Medium operation is a small business now with just 145 products. However, I intend to grow it slowly and consistently over the next couple of years. My goal is to continue growing my product line by writing consistently.

Consider your Medium operation as a business. Grow it consistently and add new articles to your portfolio every week. If you write four articles every week, you will have more than 200 articles in a year. In just five years, you will have more than 1000 articles and you will be (almost) like Walmart.

Establish your own game and play for the long term. You will have your own content empire in less than a decade.

Fahri Karakas is the author of the Self-making Studio. You can explore more here.