Why Does Everyone Just Write About Writing on Medium?

Don’t always target the lowest-hanging fruit

Rule number one of marketing: Find your target market.

As a writer, this advice is appropriate. Work out your audience and write for them. Find a niche, a topic you can be an expert on, and build a loyal audience.

But sometimes a niche becomes too narrow and a big market segment is ignored.

Case in point — are there too many Medium writers suffering from Medium Myopia? That is, have they become fixated on writing solely about Medium?

Why Do Writers on Medium Write So Much About Medium?

When I first joined Medium as a writer I wanted to see how to make it a success. It was a new distribution channel for my writing and I knew market research was important so I could write for this channel.

I searched for articles to assist me in how to write for Medium. There were hundreds and hundreds. We all know as we’ve all seen them. The algorithms recognised my interest and so my morning feed was flooded with them. Many covered the same few topics but I devoured them all. Market research, right?

They were useful — and undoubtedly accelerated my Medium journey. Lots of great tips that I used to adapt and tailor my writing to what the Medium audience would consume. I even wrote an article about it.

Guess I had joined the herd and began preaching to the herd.

It was easily my most popular article. It was accepted into Better Marketing. A sign of acceptance for me, especially as they had rejected two previous pieces I had submitted, both not related to Medium.

The article went live and I started getting lots of comments, claps, highlights. All feeding my writing ego every time a notification popped up on my phone.

Marketing gratification.

I shared the article with my friends. They didn’t like it. My most successful article of all time.

None of them liked it.

None of them write for Medium.

None of them are interested in how to write for Medium.

I posted the link on my socials, Facebook and LinkedIn, and got little engagement.

Usually, I got hundreds of likes and comments. Unlike all my other articles I had shared.

My biggest fan, my mother-in-law, texted me. She didn’t understand what curation was. What getting accepted into a publication meant. Thought em dash was a rapper. It was the only article of mine she hasn’t clapped.

No marketing gratification.

Are We Ignoring the Mainstream Medium Audience?

This got me thinking: Are we too focused on preaching how to “win” at Medium that we are ignoring a substantial part of the market? Have we all become too niche? Are we too focused on targeting Medium writers? Have we all been struck by Medium Myopia?

Or is the niche of Medium writing about Medium big enough to sustain the hundreds of Medium-related articles?

I think the answer lies somewhere in between. A happy medium — to use a poor pun.

A lot will depend on what your motivation for writing on Medium is.

If the primary driver is to get as many dollars as possible with the least effort, then writing about Medium and targeting the new daily influx of wannabe Medium millionaires can be a smart move. It’s low-hanging fruit — far easier to pick up views, be published, and earn some decent coffee money.

The main challenge would be to find a new angle. This can be hard when so many people are writing about the same thing. Only the best articles will get through.

I wrote another article for my new best friends at Better Marketing.

This time Medium didn’t appear at all. It was a pure Marketing article about a business I started with some useful lessons for people starting businesses or just interested in Marketing. A wide audience.

The dollars earned were far lower. But the views, especially from my Facebook and LinkedIn posts, were well up. I had fewer claps — most of my social media followers aren’t Medium subscribers — but there was far more engagement on social media.

Even better, someone contacted me via LinkedIn with positive feedback and asked me to write for their business blog. For money.

I had written a marketing article that resonated with them. They needed no knowledge of Medium — they just wanted to read a useful article.

My wife subscribes to Medium. She loves reading a wide range of stories. Politics, women’s issues, global events. She has no interest in learning how to write a better Medium article.

Yet, so many are focused on that. It’s like we see fresh bait — a new Medium writer — and pitch a story that they will read and clap and comment on. But we are ignoring so much of the Medium reader market.

The Marketing Strategy

My marketing strategy — and as much as we are all writers, you better believe we need to be good marketers — is to mix it up.

Listen to your customer

Medium provides great statistics. Views, reads, fans, reading time. So does social media on engagement with posts. I used this and took the feedback on board.

My customer — the people who read my articles — were giving me feedback. And the feedback differed according to the subject of the article.

Use these statistics to find out what works for you. Which subjects work the best. Which publications. Which headlines.

Marketing segmentation

This is defined as the activity of dividing a broad market of existing and potential customers into sub-groups based on similar interests.

I realised I needed to do my own market segmentation. I now write for two distinct audience segments, the writers and the readers.

Medium writers want articles on Medium. There is huge interest in that subject, and it wouldn’t make sense to ignore that.

Medium readers want a variety of articles. They don’t pay $5 a month to read about Medium. This is where I can specialise on a few topics that I’m an expert in — well, my definition of an expert — and reach a wider audience.

So I write for my different segments. This may help financially. Or it may not. Regardless, it will help me enjoy my writing more. It will appeal to more people. It will build my brand.

I won’t be Ash Jurberg, writer about Medium.

I will be Ash Jurberg, writer on Medium.

It’s the best marketing strategy for me.

But still, it would be great if my mother-in-law to clap all my articles.