Can I Discuss Your Article in the Class I Teach?

Why yes, of course you can!

Hey everyone!

I changed things up a little last week and I’m here to report on the consequences. First off, I’ve decided that it’s better to write 10 boosted posts than 30 unboosted posts, so I’ve adjusted my process to improve my chances.

I’ll get to the adjustment in a minute, but since I’m talking about boost, there’s something I have to mention AGAIN: BOOST NOMINATORS DON’T DICTATE TO MEDIUM WHAT TO BOOST, MEDIUM DICTATES TO BOOST NOMINATORS WHAT TO NOMINATE.

A lot of people have this backwards. Remember it’s IMPOSSIBLE for a nominator to boost anything. They can’t do it. Their job is to find quality work and write quality work.

You have to meet the standard or your work isn’t getting read.

My new thing

So, last week, I adjusted my process a little bit. In the past, I used to get up, write something, load it onto Medium, and hit publish.

Now, I get up, write something, load it onto Medium, and wait one day. Then, the next day when I come back, it’s a lot easier to see superfluous language that needs to be removed.

I probably don’t need to do the step where I load the article onto Medium, but that seems to help. I like seeing how the article is going to look. Viewing the layout often suggests other beneficial changes.

It seems to work

I woke up this morning to see that my most recent article was boosted. Good, I needed that. I wrote that article on Tuesday and kept tinkering on it because the publication didn’t get back to me right away (that’s not a complaint, editors are busy).

As of this month, I’ve had 3 stories get a boost already. Last month I only had 5, so I’m ahead of schedule. The one I did for Our Human Family had a huge number of rewrites. I’d been sitting on the title for that one for a while, I knew it was a good one, so I was delighted to have an article worthy of it.

I broke down and paid up

Speaking of titles, I went ahead and paid for a yearly subscription to CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. I’ve been resisting that for years, but it’s only $49 for a year, and it does feel like my articles perform better when they score in the 80s using that tool.

Sometimes, the premium titles seem a little silly to me, but if that’s what it takes to appease the psychotic robots that are in charge of distributing your work to readers, then I’m all in. The trick is in appeasing both the robots at the readers, and darn it if the rating system doesn’t seem to predict that pretty well.

As a result of my change, I didn’t publish as many articles last week, but I did a lot of writing (good writing I think). It’s sitting in my drafts folder now, and you should see it in the upcoming weeks.

In case you were wondering, the 3^rd article that I had boosted this month was the one from The Writing Cooperative. Writing quality articles for the premium publications is the best way to get boosted, and I’m fortunate that I’ve been writing a weekly column for them for about 2 years now.

The email from the professor

Last week I also received an email from a college professor who wanted to schedule a phone call based on my article in Our Human Family. She said she was going to use it in her class, which I found to be extremely flattering.

As I was chatting with her, I mentioned that if she wanted to do any articles, I’d be happy to help her so they’d be picked up by Medium’s distribution mechanism. She laughed and said she was busy with her contract with Simon & Schuster.

I thought that was pretty funny. I get so caught up in the mindset of scrambling to help people earn $50 or $100 on their articles that I forget some people have already “arrived.” That’s okay, a workman mindset is good for me. This writer’s name was Loretta Ross, on her web page she’s all over television. It was lovely talking to her.

Evaluating an old post

Last week, I teased the idea of going through one of my “make money writing on Medium” posts from when I first started. Medium isn’t opposed to those kind of articles, but it’s more interested in distributing quality work.

I wrote a lot of “finding your way” articles in my early days, and people still find them and leave me grateful comments.

Advice on topics such as getting added to publications and creating a following don’t go out of style.

Leave comments to gain followers on Medium

So, here’s an old article (this has a friend link so you can read it even if you’re not a Medium member):

Leave Comments to Gain Followers on Medium

Here’s the first paragraph:

Actually, that’s not too bad, but if I were to write this article today, I’d do some things differently. First of all, the paragraph is about twice as big as it should be for Medium.

It doesn’t matter what the words are or how good they are. Readers want to see short paragraphs and a lot of blank space. That makes them feel like they’re getting more done as they scroll through the article.

I’d also say that there’s not much of a hook. It’s kind of weak. These days, you’re better off starting with some kind of relatable personal story. Something like this:

“It’s happened to everybody, you spend hours and hours writing a great story. You find the perfect image. You post it online only to see ZERO reads over the course of the next 72 hrs! How can you get out of this frustrating death cycle of irrelevance!”

Now, keep in mind, I just wrote that. I don’t use my “sleep on it a night” rule for Substack, so if I were to seriously consider publishing this on Medium, that whole first line might change the next day.

Back to the article...

Ah... I see what I was doing. I was using this article to sneakily drop some links to other articles I’ve written. The article I mention there actually is pretty good, perhaps I’ll offer you a friend link on that one next month.

These days, I wouldn’t litter my stories with links to my other articles. The reason is that too much self-promotion can disqualify you from getting boosted (and we want that boost).

I ended up just skimming my own article. It’s not awful, it’s just like the difference between a pencil sketch of a cartoon and the finalized version. It feels to me like every paragraph should be cut in half and more jokes should be added in. Also, the links should be taken out.

Still, the advice is solid. You should be commenting on the work of other writers. That’s the best way to get the writing community to know about you. So, since I mentioned it, here’s the button (see you next week):