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PTCC: #31

👋 Waddup Part-Time Creators!

Today we're talking about how to hit the top 1% of Medium writers. It's a platform that's close to my heart and I want to tell you about commonalities in the people I see doing it really well.

Read time: 2 minutes

In the mail 📧

• Fun fact: Coursera
• The story: Top 1% of Medium
• Small ideas: Bad days, waiting & goals
• Tweetspiration: Benjamin Bethea

Fun fact

Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng were working as professors at Stanford University but wanted a way to scale education. Over weekends & evenings, they built a platform and eventually built Coursera.

THE STORY

Medium is the best way to monetise your writing. Why? Because most people don't want clients. They want to spend their time tapping away, writing about the stuff they love. Inspiring the world.

If that's you & you want to become in the top 1% of Medium writers, let's get into it.

1. You vs them

You can write for yourself but it has to be useful to someone else.

For instance, if you just tell the world how you feel and offer no tangible advice, you won’t get far. It might make you feel better but that isn’t helping your reader.

I see people doing this all the time.

Instead of channelling their frustrations and showing their audience how they overcome said challenge, they just dump their thoughts and leave all the baggage.

Write for you but make it useful to someone else.

2. Plonkers

The power of negative comments is not in the moment, it’s in the aftermath. It’s the time spent stewing. Thinking about:

• What they said
• If they were right
• What to do with this information

The best writers do one thing: they make peace with the fact that they won’t please everyone.

Tim Denning | Millionaire Writing Habits @Tim_Denning Uncomfortable Fact: You'd write 10X better if you stopped reading negative comments. March 3rd 2022 0 Retweets 17 Likes

In fact, the best don't even bother to read them.

3. Love of the game

Most writers want quick success. I’m not entirely sure why. Nothing happens at the other end of your goals. You just have more goals. It feels great to hit them but then life doesn’t stop.

You just create new goals.

Most people give up after a few months. It gets hard. They get frustrated. The top 1% of Medium writers know the prize is the writing. It’s having fun. It’s the writing, today.

The best writers write because they love to write. Well it's more than that, they write because they HAVE to write. Everything else is secondary.

4. Writer envy

I see it all the time. I used to be the worst culprit of it. I’d find evidence of people doing way better than me and it made me feel small.

It would set me back weeks.

I’d waste all this time worrying about what other people did to find that there was nothing I could do about it. The top 1% of writers on the internet don’t seek evidence that they are not good enough. They flip it.

Niharikaa Kaur Sodhi 🏔 @NiharikaSodhi Be genuinely happy to see other people win. A jealous attitude won't take you anywhere. August 27th 2022 3 Retweets 70 Likes

They see it like this: if they can, I can too.

5. Focus on your niche

Opportunities are everywhere. The internet is like a giant candy store. There is so much you could be doing.

The trick is to teach yourself to stay focused. To stay clear on the stuff that you said you want to do. Go for depth.

Nicolas Cole 🚢🏴‍☠️ @Nicolascole77 Your goal is not to become a "better" writer. Your goal is to become known for a niche you own. Different > better August 13th 2022 19 Retweets 275 Likes

If you want to be good enough to make money from writing, you have to focus all your energy on that. Stay focused for long enough, to get good enough. Earn from that, then diversify (if you want).

6. Volume is the decider

Here’s the thing. If you want to be good enough to get read and read a lot, you’ll need to write a tonne. I mean a lot. Like so much it’s hard to comprehend.

Quantity leads to quality.

Nine times out of ten the answer is to write more. To get better. To improve your craft. Then, after 3 years, you’ll be a top writer. And if you love to write, that will be music to your ears.

Closing thoughts

I’m sitting staring out the window.

It’s 6:56 am. There’s a white-haired man, tilted forward slightly. He’s making his way up the road. A blue duffle in one hand and a black bag in another. In the time it’s taken me to write this sentence, he’s stopped twice. Gathered his breath, shuffled his bags and carried on.

I bounce out of bed at 6 am. I dance down the stairs. I crack the laptop. I get tapping. Okay, that’s on a really good day but the point is, one day, I won’t be able to do that.

One day it’ll take me 10 minutes to get out of bed. Walking down the stairs will be near impossible. I’m doing it today because I can.

If you want to create something, to do something, you have to manage patience and pace. Move fast but expect the results to come slowly.

If I can do it, you can too.

Small ideas

• The bad days are down payment for the good days.
• Everything in good time, feel the pain of waiting.
• On the other side of your goals, are more goals.

Tweetspiration

Benjamin Bethea @JoyProtocol If you want trust - post personality content. If you want followers - post valuable content. If you want authority - post competence content. Post all 3 and you become a niche of 1/1 April 6th 2023 5 Retweets 85 Likes

How I can help you

Time is tight, I get it. It's why I've put together super-affordable courses to help you create alongside your full-time job. If you're interested in growing your Medium account, I'd recommend:

​→ The Medium Blueprint - The multi-layered system for creating top-quality content on Medium alongside your full-time job. The system I've used to go from 0 to $2k/month. Join 87 people.

If you're interested in growing your Twitter, I'd recommend:

→ ​0-1k Twitter course - the exact strategy I have used to go from 425 to 8k+ followers in less than 4 months. Join 224 people using the course.

Happy creating!