Lessons I’ve Learned from Top Writers on Medium

Write a lot and write consistently, that’s the most important

In an attempt to learn some of the strategies used by the top writers on Medium, I took on a mission to read as many articles as I could from a select group of writers in the past week.

As a result, I read and analyzed more than 100 articles from different writers across different topics in the span of a week. In this article, I’ll be sharing everything I’ve learned from these stories alongside some of the best ones that I came across.

I suggest taking your time while going through this article as I will share a lot of articles which, if you read and analyze properly, can help you a lot in your writing.

Reading is one of the best ways to improve your writing; and analyzing articles from top writers on Medium is the best way to speed up your progress on the platform.

I’m going to start by sharing my analysis on some of the top writers on Medium. I’m going to feature the following writers for this purpose: Sinem Günel, Zulie Rane, Michael Simmons, and Tim Denning. I will then share some other articles I read this week from other writers that I found interesting.

I was inspired to take on this challenge for myself when Dr Mehmet Yildiz introduced one of his writing challenges last week.

Here’s Dr. Yildiz’s article outlining the challenge:

The challenge was to record our daily readings and submit a story on the readings of the previous week. I took this up a notch by challenging myself to read and analyze as many articles as I could from top Medium writers and sharing what I learn from them in an article.

My other source of inspiration for this article was one of Timothy Key’s articles where he features other writers’ works. After I read this article I also wanted to do the same thing and this was the best opportunity to take both these challenges and write this article.

Here’s Timothy’s article that inspired me to do this:

Before I get started, I would like to say that more important than reading my analysis is to go through the articles I’ve featured in this article and analyze them on your own.

So, take your time going through the articles as I think everyone can get a lot of value from them. You probably can’t go through all of them in one sitting, so don’t hesitate to save the articles I’ve featured in this story and go back to them later to analyze them deeper.

Even better would be to start following the writers I’ve featured in this article, if you don’t already, and start reading and analyzing their work for years to come.

Let’s get right into it.

Sinem Günel

Sinem Günel is an internet entrepreneur who has written a 400-page book and more than 300 blog posts on various platforms in 2 years. She also helps aspiring writers get better at their craft through her online course.

Here’s everything I’ve learned from Sinem and her articles.

Write a Lot of Articles

One thing you will notice about all the writers I’ve featured in this article is that they all have a lot of articles, and I mean a lot. So much that you will get tired of scrolling down when you go to their Medium accounts.

Writing a lot is the first and most important thing when it gets to improving your writing skills.

This may be an obvious and somewhat frustrating tip. Yes, to improve your writing, you need to write more. There’s no magic pill; you can’t go from a beginner to a decent writer in one night, let alone a good one.

Getting better requires lots of practice and that means you have to be willing to write every day and publish lots of stories. This also means that you will face a lot of rejections, a lot of your early articles will suck, and you won’t get compensated for any of the work you put in because no one will read your articles.

Alright, that may be a little too harsh. I made a few cents after only a few days of having my first article up on Medium, and the article was really bad — I didn’t even edit it properly. But I made a few cents, which shows if I put in the work, I can make more.

Here’s what Sinem started with:

This is Sinem’s first article on Medium according to herself.

It’s a short article, the images don’t have any credits and the formatting isn’t great. But, that was 2 years ago and she has come a long way since then.

She now writes articles like this one:

In this article, Sinem goes through why she has decided to keep her first articles on Medium. And I’m glad she has because it helps to go back and see her progression throughout the years.

It’s also nice to see that the top writers on Medium today weren’t always the best writers ever. They were also like you and me, starting on Medium with the hopes of making it big one day, having to go through all the same stuff we have to go through to get to the top.

The truth is that it takes time to “make it” on Medium. And slow progress and patience are key. It’s like going to the gym; you won’t see results in the first weeks or even months, but if you stick to it for a few years, you’ll start to see the results that you want.

It’s important to be consistent with your writing and write a lot.

Write a Lot of Articles About the Same Topic

Sinem is a top writer in 16 topics such as ideas, business, advice, mental health, and more.

That’s because she has written more than 300 articles over the past 2 years, so she knows what she’s talking about when she writes an article on a specific topic.

The more articles you write on a specific topic, the more you’ll know about that topic, the more expert knowledge you’ll be able to share with your audience, and the more credible your stories will get. As a result, you can become a top writer on that topic.

Share your expert knowledge

You need to write about things you have an expertise in.

For example, Sinem knows a lot about writing given her 2 years’ of experience writing on Medium.

Therefore, when she shares articles on writing, her audience tunes in to read those articles.

Take a look at these articles from Sinem, all written on the topic of “writing”:

These articles are very well written, they provide a lot of value, and Sinem shares her expert knowledge on writing with her readers through them. No wonder she’s a top writer on “writing”.

You might have also noticed that all these stories have something in common: they all have the word “writing” in their titles in addition to having the tag “writing”.

That may be a coincidence, but the point is that when you write a lot of articles on the same topic, you get good at writing about that topic and you can become a top writer on that topic.

So, write a lot of articles about a specific topic and make sure you make it clear what you’re writing about.

Don’t be scared of sharing articles on something you’re not an expert on

Sharing your expert knowledge is amazing, but don’t be afraid of writing articles on topics you’re not an expert on.

As long as you know a little more about a topic than the general public and you do your research, you can provide value through your articles. And if your article provides value, share it. You never know what might happen.

Sinem is from Germany, and her first language isn’t English. She also wasn’t a copywriter or a famous journalist before she started on Medium, but she’s a top writer on “writing”.

That’s because she started sharing her experience writing on Medium to help new writers on the platform. She’s written a lot of articles about writing on Medium and, therefore, she can provide a lot of value to a lot of people through those articles.

Providing value is key, everyone appreciates when you provide them with a lot of value. And if people are learning from your articles, they’ll keep coming back to read them.

So, share your expert knowledge with others and if you know even a little more than the general public about something, share that with your audience. Share anything you might think is valuable and leave the rest to your audience.

Let Your Personality Shine Right Through Your Writing

This is one of the biggest things I notice with great writers. They let their personalities shine through their writing.

That means they’re vulnerable and share emotions through their writing. They write about all sorts of emotions: love, joy, pride, anger, frustration, and anything else they feel. They write about their life experiences which allow the readers to relate to them.

Sinem always shares positivity, encourages her readers through her writing, and inspires them to do better and to achieve their goals.

If you go through a few articles from Sinem, you will feel her personality through the articles. You will feel as if you know her and you know exactly what her intentions are — to help and to give back to the community.

Give your articles personality by letting your personality shine through your writing.

Use Small Paragraphs and Short Sentences

This is one of the most important tips I’ve learned from top writers on Medium.

It’s not only Sinem who follows this, but she does it very well.

Just read the introduction of this article:

It’s so effective, and the reason is the way she has structured her sentences and paragraphs.

She breaks down the paragraphs into small ones and uses short sentences.

That gives the writing so much power and it keeps the audience’s attention throughout the whole thing.

Take a look at how that same introduction would look like if she had structured it like this:

“I love writing, I love making money online, I love Medium, and I love empowering people to create a life they truly enjoy. I am convinced everyone can have it all and live in full abundance and joy. I don’t think you making it big on Medium will dim my light, or lower my stats. This might be a naive approach, but in my 22 years of life, I had great results, so I’ll keep living that way. There’s too much greed, hate, and envy on this planet anyway, so I am trying to be the opposite: I want to be your biggest cheerleader and support you as much as I can in building a life and business you love…”

I know if it was me, I would have skimmed through this and skipped a couple of sentences from the middle of the paragraph. This is such a big paragraph and it takes away from the power of each sentence.

We often keep in mind not to write run-on sentences, but we forget to pay attention to how big our paragraphs are.

Having said that, you don’t want to write one sentence per paragraph. That would be weird. But, you want to break up your paragraphs in a way that makes sense and keeps the audience’s attention.

Follow the same formatting throughout an article

The first thing you need to do with your writing is to grab the audience’s attention. Once you’ve done that, you need to make sure that you keep their attention.

Attention is very finite, and given how much distractions we have in our daily lives and how much content we come across daily on social media, it gets pretty hard for content creators to get their audience’s attention.

That’s why you need to make sure you don’t lose your audience in the middle of your article. You want them to read the whole thing and get the point of the article.

To do that, you need to follow the same formatting that you started with at the beginning of the article all the way through to the end.

What I mean by that is if you’re using a few bolded sentences in each section of your article, you need to make sure that every section has a few bolded sentences in it.

If you’re breaking up your paragraphs, you need to keep doing it throughout the entire article, not just the introduction.

Go back to the “3 Lessons About Medium I Wish I Knew About Earlier” article and scroll through it to the end. You will see that Sinem keeps the same formatting throughout the whole thing.

She keeps using short sentences and small paragraphs, big section headings, some bolded words here and there, and some italicized sentences throughout the entire story.

So, make sure you keep in mind the formatting and the structure of your article and follow through with it from the top to the end of the article.

Follow the Rules

This is a very important one.

I’m going to let one of Sinem’s articles to do talking for me this time:

“And I’m scared by how many people don’t seem to understand that you must follow the rules if you want to succeed on a platform.”

This simple sentence summarizes why so many people on Medium don’t do well. They fail to understand that they need to follow the rules.

You must follow the rules if you want to succeed on Medium. You can’t just start writing on Medium in the middle of 2020 and expect that the platform is going to change its rules for you. Or that you’re going to change the way everything works because you don’t like the way things are around here.

You need to be grateful that this platform even exists. I mean you get to write, share your work for free and then people read it and you make money. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Following the rules on Medium is the fastest way to improve your writing and speed up your progress on the platform. Read articles from the top writers, follow them on other social media platforms, namely Twitter, and pay close attention to the way they do things.

From the way they write to how often they post and which publications they post on. You need to pay attention to every little detail and learn from the best writers on Medium. Having said that, you don’t need to copy them, you just need to learn from them and follow the same rules they follow. But more on that later.

Don’t complain

I have personally seen people complaining about their articles not getting accepted by publications on Facebook groups.

You need to remember that no matter how much work you put in, you will never know whether your article will get accepted or not. The publications don’t owe you anything, they’re not supposed to publish your work — again, no matter how much time you put into it.

All you can do is to keep writing and making your articles better when they get rejected. Don’t be discouraged by rejections, and don’t complain. Get inspired by them and decide for yourself that you won’t give up on the article until you find it a home.

Sinem also talks about this topic here:

So, follow the rules and don’t complain. Your attitude will determine your results and there’s no better way to progress on Medium than to learn from the already proven strategies.

Zulie Rane

Zulie Rane has been writing on Medium since September 2018 and has a full-time job besides writing on Medium and she also has her own YouTube channel where she shares tips on writing and how to do well on Medium.

The first thing I’ve noticed about Zulie is that she doesn’t check her notifications and her earnings on Medium, and she also doesn’t read comments on her articles.

She mentions these in this article:

The reason I’m mentioning this is that I don’t necessarily agree with all of them. Let me explain.

I respect that Zulie doesn’t check her earnings. She writes on Medium because she loves writing, not because writing is her full-time job that she earns a living through.

Constantly checking your stats and your earnings will drive you nuts. It can be stressful and it could take the joy out of writing as Zulie puts it. Therefore, it can be wise not to check your earnings and your notifications on Medium.

But, if you know me, you know that I love reading and answering comments. I love interacting with others through comments; whether it’s answering every comment on Medium, Instagram, or replying to tweets on Twitter.

I understand why Zulie doesn’t do this, however. She shares that she gets anxious when she checks comments on her Medium posts.

“I get anxious and stressed out and nervous looking at comments.”

She says that she can’t find the words to express her genuine thanks to everyone who reads and comments on her articles and that she spends a lot of time thinking about the negative comments which make her angry.

I like answering comments because that’s the way I interact with my audience and connect to them on a deeper level. I also think that you show your audience how much you value them by answering their comments. That comes from years of consuming Gary Vaynerchuck’s content.

So, for me, I’ll always answer comments and check my notifications, and I’ll advise beginners to do the same. Zulie already has a big following and she doesn’t write for a living. So, she can kind of get away with not answering comments. But, for beginners, I think you should answer the few comments you get. It shows respect.

Having said that, I understand why some people wouldn’t like answering comments and that’s okay, just make sure you connect with your audience in some other way.

Zulie does that through her YouTube channel where she also answers comments; and she happened to answer one of my questions on one of her videos today which I appreciate a lot.

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at some best practices I’ve learned from Zulie.

Format Your Articles Before Writing Them

Formatting your articles before you write them will make your life 100 times easier.

Zulie talked about this during one of her live YouTube videos where she wrote an article from scratch to finish.

In this video, she went live to share her writing process with her audience, and I got a lot of value from watching it.

This is where I saw for the first time how she writes her stories. She starts with outlining her story, and for this, she writes the title of the story, all the section headings, and picks out a few images for the story as well, especially the featured image.

She then can start filling out each section in no specific manner. She’ll write whichever section she can come up with first and move on to the other ones at random.

After she’s done writing, she edits the peace by reading it out loud, which is also another huge tip for making sure your stories have great flow. Then she does the finishing touches, adds the tags, and submits the story.

Now, this doesn’t mean she follows the exact same routine every time, she might or she might not. But, that doesn’t matter. The point is that by outlining her story and writing each section heading before writing the story she,

1. has the freedom to write whichever section of the story she wants first,
2. and she can organize her thoughts better and make sure she doesn’t get off-topic.

Don’t get off-topic

Speaking about going off-topic, I’ve had this problem for a long time with my writing. I easily get off-topic and write on and on about something completely irrelevant in the middle of a story or an essay.

Not that I have mastered not going off-topic yet, but outlining a story before I write helps a lot. That’s what I did for this story.

Take a look at this story:

Zulie talks about her relationship with her current boyfriend which started in college. I found it brilliant that she paints the story as if that relationship didn’t work out, but at the end of the article, she shares — spoiler alert — that she’s still with the same guy she talks about throughout the article.

She also was going through a lot of other things when she was in college, as everyone does, but she doesn’t let her other experiences take away from the main point of this story by sharing them.

If it was me, I probably would have talked about how a relationship I wasn’t ready for effected my work, studies, mental health, and everything in between. The story would be really long and way off-topic.

And that’s where outlining your stories before writing them comes in handy. It helps you stay on topic and organize your thoughts better. So, I recommend you try it next time you’re writing a story.

Come Up With Creative Section Headings

This is another thing I learned from Zulie in her live YouTube video.

Having great titles is the key to getting your audience to click on the story, but having creative section headings will help you keep the audience’s attention when they’re reading the story.

As Zulie was writing her story, she mentioned that by coming up with creative section headings, you make sure that you keep the audience’s attention.

When someone is reading your story, they can just read the section headings, think to themselves that they already know everything you’re talking about and exit the article. I’m guilty of doing this myself.

Coming up with creative section headings helps you keep the audience’s attention and it keeps the story interesting to the readers.

Take a look at the section headings of this story, for example:

The sections headings aren’t obvious things that you could just look at and get the point of the story. They’re unique, they spark the reader’s curiosity to read and find out exactly what Zulie means by them.

Coming up with creative section headings will help you keep the audience’s attention and tell your story fully and in a unique way.

Learn From the Top Writers, but Don’t Copy Them

Zulie shares in her story, “A Transparent Look at Earning My First $10,000 Writing on Medium”, that she used to try to imitate what the top writers on Medium were writing about when she got started with writing.

She says that she hated doing this as she wasn’t interested in the same things they were interested in. And that “sucks the fun out of writing” as Zulie would say.

And she’s totally right about that. You can’t write about topics that you’re not interested in and expect your stories to do well. They might for some time, but then you’ll start to hate the process of writing which will hinder your success on Medium.

So, write about things you love, and also, share your feelings through your stories as I mentioned before. Sharing emotions is one of the best qualities of a good story.

Take a look at this story from Zulie:

It’s such a strong personal story where Zulie shares how she felt about her body for a long time. It takes courage to share a story like this with tens of thousands of people. It’s vulnerable, and that’s what makes the story so powerful.

Share your emotions, write about what you feel and what you love, that’s the best way to connect to your audience, and write stories that impact them in a positive way.

Michael Simmons

Michael Simmons is an award-winning social entrepreneur, bestselling author, and contributor to publications like Forbes, Fortune, Inc., Entrepreneur, Time, Business Insider, and HBR.

Simply put, this guy is the GOAT.

I love Michael’s story. According to his about page, he co-founded his first business at age 16 which was “rated the #1 youth-run web development company in the nation by Youngbiz Magazine.”

He has won 3 entrepreneur-of-the-year awards he’s been “personally recognized for his entrepreneurial accomplishments by President Barack Obama”.

That’s why I say this guy is the GOAT.

He has also written many life-changing articles. I don’t need to cite this because his articles have changed my perspective and as a result, they will change my life.

Here are a few things I’ve learned from Michael.

Spend a Lot of Time Learning and Then Applying Everything You Learn to Your Niche

I was always intrigued by the way some of the most successful people on Earth today do things. People like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs (who is unfortunately not with us anymore), Warren Buffett, and many more.

All these guys have done different things and achieved mind-blowing results over their lifetimes. And they continue to do better and bigger things.

One thing they all have in common: they read a lot, and I mean a lot.

Michael talks about that in this article:

Here is a list of people Michael shares in this article that spend lots of time reading:

“Other lumineer readers include billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban (three-plus hours a day), billionaire entrepreneur Arthur Blank (two-plus hours a day), billionaire investor David Rubenstein (six books a week), billionaire entrepreneur Dan Gilbert (one to two hours a day), Oprah Winfrey (credits reading for much of her success), Elon Musk (two books a day when he was younger), Mark Zuckerberg (a book every two weeks), Jeff Bezos (hundreds of science fiction novels by the time he was 13), and CEO of Disney, Bob Iger (gets up every morning at 4:30 a.m. to read).”

What I take from this is that if these guys spend so much time reading, then I should be too. If anything, I should be reading more than them if I want to catch up to them and build anything remotely close to the magnitude that they have built.

You probably have heard of the 10,000-hour rule. And although there’s a lot of bad press behind it, I think if you spend 10,000 hours on anything, you’re going to know more about that subject than most people.

What fascinates me more about the list of people I shared earlier, is that they read lots of books from different subjects (spending thousands of hours acquiring knowledge) and then they bring all that knowledge together to create a top 1% skill set.

This is what Michael calls being a “polymath”:

“I define a modern polymath as someone who becomes competent in at least three diverse domains and integrates them into a top 1-percent skill set.”

He talks about it further in this article:

I’ve always had a lot of interests, I’ve tried so many different things in my life, I’ve been playing the guitar for the past 11 years, I’ve loved writing ever since I was a little kid and didn’t even know how to read and write, I love philosophy, history, learning about different cultures and languages, and more.

I’ve explored a lot of these topics by reading books on them and I have recently started to increase my speed in reading books and consuming more content that I can learn from.

I have friends who are the same way and for this reason, I don’t fit in with many people and I never did at school either. So, in the back of my mind, I always thought to have a lot of interests was a bad thing until I came across Michael’s articles.

Reading Michael’s articles ensured me that I’m on the right path and that if I continue to feed my curiosity, I will create a top 1% skill set for myself that I can use to help others with — that’s always been my number one goal and desire.

Spending lots of time learning and reading articles on Medium can also help you a lot in becoming a better writer. So, read a lot and use everything you learn to write articles that provide a lot of unique insights to your audience like Michael does. I’m sure you’ll succeed if you follow that advice, both on Medium and in other areas of your life.

Quality Will Get You Better Results Than Quantity

One thing I see a lot on Medium is people talking about how quantity will get you great results. I disagree with that to some degree.

I think it’s important to write a lot, write consistently, and publish a lot of stories, but it’s also crucial to publish articles that have a high quality.

Read these articles word for word and you’ll understand why you need to be creating high-quality articles:

As Michael puts it, you have to create “Blockbuster” articles. These are articles that have high quality, great titles, and great topics. These are articles that go viral, get a lot of clicks and a lot of shares.

Writing a lot is easy. A lot of people write a lot of mediocre articles on Medium and share them. So, if you’re writing mediocre articles, you’ll be competing with all those other mediocre stories.

What you need to do instead, is to write high-quality articles that stand out in the crowd. That’s not easy, it requires a lot of practice and lots of time invested in your craft. But, if you take the time to learn how to do this, you will reap the benefits sooner rather than later.

This is something that I still have a long way to go to learn for myself. So, my recommendation is to spend lots of time reading and learning from great articles, like I’ve been doing ever since I got onto Medium and like I’ll be doing for years to come.

Provide a Lot of Value — And I Mean, a Lot

I’ve gotten so much value out of Michael’s articles. Most of his articles are 20-minute-plus reads, and if you want to digest everything properly, you need to spend even more time on them.

They’re rich with examples, illustrations, resources, and they provide a lot of value. I spent nearly 5 hours last week on Michael’s articles alone. And I need to spend so much more time reading more of them and practicing the principals he shares in his articles. And I know it’s worth it because I’m getting so much out of them.

Here is another article from Michael that provides a ton of value:

In this article, Michael shares three levels of reality as “getting stuff done”, “principals”, and “algorithms”. He talks about how most people just focus on getting stuff done and going through life dealing with problems as they come up.

The other two levels involve analyzing problems, taking things you learn from different areas of life, and applying them to every new problem you come across.

That’s the way most successful people operate, and that’s how you need to operate if you want to reach massive amounts of success.

So, provide a lot of value through your articles. Talk about unique things. Spend lots of time researching for your articles and that’s going to increase your articles’ quality.

Tim Denning

Tim Denning is my favorite writer on Medium. He’s a writer for CNBC and Business Insider, according to his bio. And he’s “known mostly for his work on Entrepreneur.com, Addicted2Success.com, and The Mission (On Medium).” He also advises “some of the most iconic tech companies in the world”.

Tim Denning is a top writer in a lot of topics as you can see in his bio. And there’s one reason for that. He writes a lot.

Write a Lot and Write Consistently

Tim Denning has published 10 articles per week across different platforms for the past 3 years.

To me, this means he’s not your average writer who’s trying to make it big on Medium to sell you courses and make more money. No, he’s already made it, and that’s because he works very hard and has a lot of discipline.

You can see that in these articles:

You need to write consistently to make it big on Medium or any other platform for that matter. That means having a routine and rituals you follow every day that gets you in the zone.

Showing up is the hardest part of writing. You have to show up every day and write, that’s the only way to get better. And getting better is crucial in writing because that’s what will determine your results.

You can market your articles the best way you can, use the best pictures, come up with the best titles, but if your writing isn’t good and it isn’t getting better, people will not read your work.

You could lose your audience slowly if you’re not getting better consistently, and your audience is the most important thing to you as a writer. If you don’t have an audience, your writing is worth nothing.

Your Audience Decides How Good Your Articles Are

Speaking about the audience, they are the only ones who decide whether your articles are good enough.

The editors at the publications you submit to might love your article, they might put it on the top of the first page of their publication, but if the audience doesn’t like it and doesn’t tune in to read it, your article is worth nothing — nada.

You will earn a few cents, maybe a few dollars at best, and the same article you thought was the best one you had ever written will be your worst performing one. That’s pretty disappointing. That’s why you need to keep writing because you never know which article will do well and which won’t.

Take a look at these articles from Tim:

The first one discusses an important issue around landlords evicting their tenants during these harsh economic times. It also shares a great perspective that both landlords and tenants can use to understand each other’s situations and help each other get through these times.

The second is a hilarious comedy article about LinkedIn influencers. You just have to read that one to understand why I think it’s so good.

They’re both amazing articles, yet they have less than 600 claps altogether as of the time I’m writing this article.

If you go through Tim’s account on Medium, you’ll see a lot of articles with thousands of claps. So, I’ll assume that those perform relatively well. But, then some articles have tens of thousands of claps from thousands of people.

This is one of them with 37,000 claps from almost 9000 people:

What sets this article apart?

It’s written by the same author, published in MindCafe where Tim publishes articles often, and it was published a little over a month ago.

So, how come this one did so well, but the other two I shared earlier didn’t?

Well, the audience liked this one more.

At the end of the day, the audience will decide how good your article is and what it’s worth, so all you can do is to keep writing and sharing your work. The rest of always up to the audience.

Write When You Feel Inspired

Tim talks about this a lot. You need to write with emotion.

You’re most likely going to write your best articles when you’re feeling emotional and inspired. Write when you’re angry, sad, happy, in love, frustrated, etc.

Write about the way you feel and write when you feel inspired by your emotions. Moments of inspiration are rare according to Tim:

“There are these rare moments in your life called inspiration.”

This is only one of Tim’s articles where he talks about why it’s so good to write about your emotions.

He also talks about it in this one:

“The best writing comes from emotion.

When you’re pissed off, write. When someone you love dies, write. When your boss fires you, write. When your partner breaks up with you, write.”

When you write about your emotions, you’re vulnerable, and that means you’ll connect to your audience on a deeper level. You need to show your audience that you’re also human with a lot of shitty feelings, and good ones too.

Once you start doing this, you’ll see that more people get inspired by your writing, and the more people get inspired by your writing, the more they’ll appreciate your work. That way, you gain true fans.

Find Your Articles the Right Home

This is an important one, especially on Medium. Publishing your articles in the right publication will help you speed up your progress on Medium a lot.

Finding the right publishing for your article will grant you access to the attention of more people than already follow you.

And to be honest, given the way Medium works, people are more likely to read your work if it’s published in a publication. Medium recommends stories from publications more than it recommends self-published stories.

Everyone also follows a lot of people on Medium, so when you publish a story, your followers are probably not even going to see it. Remember, there’s so much content out there and only a finite amount of attention. So, you need to make sure that you grab your audience’s attention the best way you can.

Here are a few stories published in The Ascent by Tim:

I love these stories and I feel like they’re the perfect stories for The Ascent. As in, if someone asked me what type of articles they should submit to The Ascent, I’d advise them to read Tim’s articles published in The Ascent.

In fact, I feel that Tim usually writes the best stories for every publication he submits to.

Yes, I’m probably very bias about this one, because I love Tim Denning so much. But, you can’t argue against the fact that his articles are really good.

So, follow publications that you’d like to write for. Learn what they like and what they don’t, and write the best stories for them. You won’t regret doing this.

You Can Learn From Beginners Too

Don’t underestimate what beginners can teach you.

Beginners have a different outlook on things. They usually don’t think about limitations, their expectations are different, and they don’t think about what others think.

I know this because I, myself, am a beginner, and in fact, I feel like a beginner in guitar as well, even though I’ve been playing for 11 years.

The truth is that you can always learn more, you can always get better, and you can always push yourself outside of your comfort zone to grow.

I came across a new writer on Medium this week and his stories really inspired me.

Here’s one of them:

Kunal Walia talks about how the greatest asset you have as a new writer is that you can write without fear. Your work will most likely not be judged by thousands of people because it won’t be seen by thousands of people.

So, as a beginner, you can make more mistakes without being scrutinized for it. You will be able to share your thoughts with people on the internet more freely and you will learn a lot in the process.

Here’s another article from Kunal that I found interesting:

He talks about writing about how you feel when you lose motivation to write. It’s an amazing article, I highly suggest checking it out.

Here’s another great writer I found a few weeks ago: Kashish Mehta.

I found Kashish from one of the Facebook groups I’m in and I had the pleasure of chatting with him on Facebook. Here’s one of his stories that stood out to me the most:

Kashish writes about how the MBA degree is not as meaningful anymore as it used to be. And he sheds light on issues that I find are important to talk about in today’s world.

Last but not least, I wanted to give a shout out to my friend, Shervin Varshokar.

I’d like to say that I inspired him to write on Medium, and here’s the first story he has shared here:

He talks about his experience with his undergrad education and why he decided to drop out of university after 2 years of studying.

He also brings up topics that I find are very important to talk about as I’m very passionate about improving the education system and bringing more value to kids through education. But, that’s a topic for another article.

Final Thoughts

Having done this challenge, there are two things that stand out to me the most:

1. you need to write a lot of high-quality articles to succeed on Medium,
2. I need more than a week to analyze the work of top writers on Medium and learn from them.

The only way to get good results on Medium is by improving your writing and to do that, you need to practice a lot and for a long time.

As I said earlier, the writers I featured in this article have written hundreds of articles over many years to get to where they are right now. So, you need to write a lot and write consistently as well.

I will also spend so much more time from now on analyzing top writers on Medium. Because that can teach me things that these writers have learned through years of practice and experience.

The more I learn the better I’ll get, and that’s my number one goal on Medium.

I recognize that I have so much time ahead of me and that I’ve been given such an amazing opportunity with Medium. So, I’m going to continue writing, reading, and striving to get better.

Thank you so much for reading this story. I hope you got some value out of it.