My First Lesson Learned on Medium
Two Simple but Efficient Ways to Get Inspiration for Your Next Blog Post.
Having a passive income source is one of my top objectives in my life. I read a lot about different ways to achieve this objective and I decided to make blogging my first source.
After this decision, the first question that came to my mind: what should I write about? As a data scientist I decided to write about the skills that I have and I started with two courses which you can find here:
- Python Complete Beginner to Expert Course
- The Complete Course in Object Oriented Programming in Python
After writing 32 stories, I stumbled with the following advice somewhere on the web:
“Write about what people love to read.”
Although it looks very straight forward but I have realized that I have started wrongly. I have started writing about what I love not about what people love.
I decided to follow this advice by writing about not only what people love but also what I love. In other words, it is writing about the intersection between both areas. I like to call it the golden area. Refer to Figure 1.
The question now is:
How to find this golden area?
In order to answer this question, I have explored Medium website and I have found several ideas that might be helpful for you and I would like to share them here. I can summarize these ideas in two different ways: Search by a topic and Search in a publication.
- Search by a Topic
As a data scientist, I am expert in Python programming language. Therefore, I have chosen Python as topic to write about. To validate my topic, I have opened my web browser and typed the following URL:
From Figure 2 and on the top left corner you can see that there are 46 k writers who wrote 110k stories about this topic and this is a clear indication that there is a significant interest in this topic.
Nice, I can say that Python is a good topic. Now let us find what to write about in this topic. You can see from Figure 1 that by default when the page is opened the selected tab is “Trending”. This tab shows you a list of stories that are trending in Medium about this topic right now. It is very nice right, isn’t?
Let us move forward and see a cooler feature that Medium provides. Click on “Best” tab. Refer to Figure 3.
You can see that Medium provides all the best articles for this topic and you can filter them by week, month, year, or all time. In other words, I can say that this is the golden area that I need to explore in order to find some inspiration about what to write next.
- Search in a Publication
Medium publications are shared spaces for stories written around a common theme or topic, usually by multiple authors. In other words, a publication is minimized version of Medium for a specific niche.
For each common topic in Medium, there are several publications active and publishing about this topic. You can simply use the search box in Medium to find some publications interested in your topic or ask google about the most important publications about your topic.
In my case, as a data scientist, “Towards Data Science” is one of the most common publications in the field. It has 627 k followers. Refer to Figure 4.
The following URL is this publication URL:
https://towardsdatascience.com
Now, let us append this URL by the word “/archive” (you can do this with any publication URL). Refer to Figure 5.
You can see from this image that you can sort these publication stories by the most read criterion. You can also filter the data using years and months to find the most read stories in a specific time. In other words, it is another way to find the golden area to get some inspiration about what to write next.
- Summary
In this article the advice of finding the golden area, the intersection between what people love to read and what I like to write about as a writer, has been discussed. Two methods to find this golden area have been presented. The first method showed how to find the trending stories about a specific topic. The second method showed how to find the trending stories in a specific publication. In future stories, I will share with you how to apply these methods using data analytics techniques which will help you find the golden area by scanning several topics and publications at once to get more valuable ideas.
Now it is your turn, If you know better ways would you please share them in the comments below.
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