How I grew to 20,000 followers in just over a year
At the beginning of 2020, I simply used Medium as a "medium" for documenting my learnings for data science on a weekly basis. I didn’t even know what Medium was at the time – I honestly thought it was an alternative to WordPress.
Fast forward to today and I’m now approaching 25,000 followers with almost 4,000,000 article views. As well, Medium now makes up almost 25% of my total income each year.
In this article, I want to share my secrets for how I built my data science blog and my follower base to what it is today. Keep in mind that these tips are not hacks or ways to cheat the system – building a blog requires a lot of work. However, these tips will help you think about certain things that you might have never thought of before.
With that said, let’s dive into it!
Tip #1: Find the intersection of what you’re good at writing about, what you like to write about, and what people like to read.
This is the first tip that I always give to aspiring writers. Ideally, you want to find a niche that satisfies all three of these things.
If you find something that you’re good at writing about and you also like writing about it, but people don’t like to read about it, then you won’t build a follower base (assuming you care about this).
If you find a topic that you’re good at writing about and people like to read about it, but you don’t enjoy writing about it, then you won’t last long as you’ll lose interest.
Lastly, if you find a topic that you enjoy writing about and people like to read about it, but you’re not good at writing about it (because you don’t have enough expertise for example), then you might not get any traction.
And so, spend the beginning of your journey figuring out your niche. I’m going to elaborate on this in tip #3.
Tip #2: Understand the mechanics of the platform you’re writing on.
Whether you’re using Medium, Substack, Patreon, or another platform for blogging, make sure that you take the time to understand how the platform works.
I can’t get into too much detail about this but understanding things like earnings are calculated, how the platform can help you with advertising yourself, and things like that are important to think about.
By understanding the mechanics of Medium and how it works, I was able to maximize my outreach and ultimately grow my follower base much quicker.
The next tip will help you achieve tips #1 and #2:
Tip #3: Consider the concept "Exploitation vs Exploration" when creating content.
In order to find the intersection of the three things in tip #1 and to understand the mechanics of the platform you’re writing on, consider the concept of exploitation vs exploration.
This idea comes from a statistical problem called "the multi-armed bandit problem." I won’t get into too much detail, but the main idea behind "exploration and exploitation" is deciding whether to explore and find new potential ideas or to exploit ideas that you already know that works.
At the beginning of your writing/blogging career, it’s in your best interest to explore and try as many ideas as possible to see what works best for you. This means writing about different topics, publishing on different publications (on Medium), and potentially trying new writing styles.
As you become more developed in your writing style and preferences, you may stumble upon a "recipe" that gives you consistent success in your writing. This is when you can start to exploit that breakthrough and double down on your secret formula.
To summarize, explore as much as possible early in your journey, and as you start to define yourself and find success, start to exploit those insights and ideas that make you successful.
Tip #4: Stay up to date with what people are interested in reading.
This will probably depend on the topic that you’re writing about, but since I’m writing about data science, I always have to keep up to date with what people are interested in learning about as that’s always changing.
How do I do this?
It’s nothing fancy, but I simply have a list of websites and YouTube channels that I periodically go through to come up with new ideas. For example, when I saw a crash course for learning SQL, I thought about writing a 52 week crash course for learning data science skills including statistics, Python, SQL, Pandas, etc.
By staying up to date with what people are interested in and by taking the time to think about new ideas, you’ll be able to build a content pipeline and never run out of ideas to write about! 🙂
Tip #5: Maintain a consistent schedule.
This one sounds obvious, but I truly believe that following this tip was the backbone of my success.
Last year, I made a commitment to learn and write about data science every week for 52 weeks, and doing so allowed me to build an efficient system for writing articles on a consistent basis without getting burned out. Also, by being consistent, you’ll undoubtedly push out more content and ultimately grow your blog quicker.
So find a writing schedule that works for you, whether it’s one article a week or one article a month, and stick to it!
Thanks for Reading!
I hope you found this helpful! This is a little different from what I normally write about, but leave a comment if you’d like to see more articles like this.
As always, I wish you the best in your learning endeavors. 🙂
Not sure what to read next? I’ve picked another article for you:
and another one!
A Complete 52 Week Curriculum to Become a Data Scientist in 2021
Terence Shin
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