If you’re not a Medium member you can still read this piece for free by clicking my friend link here — Grow Engagement by Writing to Provide Value for Others
I started writing on Medium at the start of this year, to develop a powerful habit. I wasn’t particularly concerned whether it was going to provide me with income or a route into a career, although I wanted people to gain value and insight from what I was producing.
For months, my writing went unnoticed, and I had a hard time figuring out why. Even now, the articles I published in January combine for a grand total of 9 reads.
This article details how I went from this low engagement to building an organic audience where my reads and follows continue to grow exponentially. I will focus on the most important change I made to my writing that allowed me to find a niche and an engaged audience. I hope you enjoy it.
How did I turn things around?
I was writing content about many topics, trying to narrow down what people wanted to learn about. Things like meditation, digital minimalism and handwriting. I continued to probe with little success.
Then I published an article about something I created — an AI writing team that could generate entire articles in less than a minute in Obsidian, my note-taking app of choice. It was quite specific, and I didn’t expect many people to read it. Instead, I found that this piece gained more views than my previous most popular article within three days of its publication.
I credit its success to being a relevant and unique piece. I hadn’t completely realised it yet, but this was a turning point for my Medium writing. I became aware that this piece was providing concrete and actionable advice about a topic that many people were currently interested in. I knew how to integrate AI and Obsidian. People were showing interest in the same thing and were thus reading and learning from what I knew.
Now that I’d found a framework that engaged readers, it was time to rinse and repeat. Since I published this article, I’ve received almost 13x the engagement on my work, in 20% of the time I’d spent publishing articles before.
The secret? I’d started to write about what I knew rather than projecting what I wanted to find out. This is the one change that made all the difference and for the rest of the article, I’m going to explain in detail what I mean. I’ll also give some concrete tips about how you can go about finding a dedicated audience in the same way that I did.
“I’d started to write about what I knew, rather than projecting what I wanted to find out.”
My interests lie broadly in the areas of self-improvement, productivity and science. I’m always trying to learn more about this topic, implementing new techniques and practices to improve my fulfilment.
At the start of my writing journey, I assumed that, because I was interested in these topics and actively learning about them, other people would be interested in hearing my insights about what I had learned.
Wrong.
I was uncertain about the importance and effectiveness of the topics and activities I was writing about, and this was projected in my writing. People didn’t want advice from an untested university undergraduate. They wanted answers and steps to take from people who knew what they were on about.
Over time, I segued into writing about how I was getting work done in university and elsewhere with productivity software that I use daily and know inside out. This knowledge, although second nature to me at this point, was insightful to other readers who wanted to apply something similar.
My content changed to step-by-step guides and actionable advice rather than simple musings on topics that held my interest. As a result, audience engagement swelled and my sense of accomplishment increased. This is why in the title I recommended that you write for other people because, in my own experience, the fulfilment was higher when I knew that people’s lives were improving because of my work.
Tips for finding a niche which engages and provides value to your readers
Stay on the pulse of current topics. People enjoy the feeling of being up-to-date so that they don’t avoid the feeling of missing out. In my own writing experience, AI was at the forefront of progress in every field I looked into, therefore much of my content recently has surrounded the use of AI in Obsidian. This was powerful because of how it integrated something at the forefront of news and software that I had a high amount of knowledge using.
Pick knowledge and action that is second nature to you. Perhaps it’s how you run your current business — mine was how I stay on top of uni work. For the best results, integrate your writing on the subject with something that is in the public eye currently, like AI. This will provide a lot more value than projecting the current uncertainty you have about a topic that’s recently caught your interest.
Another tip is to continue to iterate your output. By writing, releasing and monitoring the impact of your content, you can gauge what people want to learn about and tailor your following pieces to this preference. I’m iterating as I write this piece — writing about how to write is an extension of my knowledge that I’ve grown recently, so I’ve decided to see whether people gain value from this kind of content as well as my other work.
I can draw a strong link to experience here. When you are more experienced, you will get better at being able to tell which trends and content will be popular with your readers. This ends up saving you time by avoiding the production of irrelevant content.
The most effective strategy I found, however, was to remove my current interests from my writing. These were the topics that I had less certainty and knowledge about. Instead, I started to focus on explaining the systems that I use to run my everyday productivity. Other people wanted to know how I was doing this, therefore the work gained a lot more interest.
Conclusion
I hope you found some value in this article. As I said earlier, I’m always iterating and I’ve never written a piece quite like this, so I’m interested to see how it will perform. If you enjoyed the article consider following me. This means better quality content more often. Thanks for reading!