Blogging tips
My First 100 Posts on Medium
A reflection, and a suggestion.
So, I’ve now begun my 100th blog post here on Medium. By that, I don’t mean 100 published posts, but rather that I have started that number. It includes drafts.
While it’s nice to see 53 published posts on my stories page, this brings home to me that I also have a lot of articles (perhaps far too many) that I have started but not yet finished.
To very briefly break this down, the 47 fall roughly equally into three categories:
- Around a third are more or less finished and ready for publication. The main reason to hold them back is so that I am not publishing too many all on one day. This is my backlog.
- Another third are sitting at around 200–300 words. In the most case, these have been started, but still need a proper writing session to get them up to scratch. Further thinking and research, too.
- The remainder have only around 50 words so far. These are only ideas, really, only starts… typically, they don’t have any more than a title and subtitle.
I guess, then, I feel it is worth keep an eye on those proportions. Having dozens of drafts would be of very little benefit if all of them were very far from the finished article stage.
I’m pretty comfortable with having some more developed than others, and the proportions above don’t worry me. Perhaps, though, going forward, I will keep the “title only” ideas in a notebook rather than creating a draft based on something that I might never write.
Finally, wouldn’t it be great if the drafts folder had the functionality of a spreadsheet?
Drafts appear to automatically sort by the date of the last edit, but it would be really handy to be able to sort them by (for example) date of creation, word count/reading time, and perhaps also by tags.
That’s my suggestion for Medium Staff.
A couple of things. First, a shoutout to Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles for her write-ups of “What to read on Medium this week”. Very helpful!
Also, if you’d like to experience Medium yourself, consider supporting me and thousands of other writers by signing up for a membership. It only costs $5 per month, it genuinely supports writers, and you have the chance to make serious money with your own writing as well! By signing up with this link, you’ll support me directly with a portion of your fee, it won’t cost you extra. If you do, thank you so very much!
