Note: This is a guest post by Blake Powell, he’s a writer, entrepreneur, and dreamer. He helps writers uncover the power of their voice and share their unique messages with the world to grow their platforms ten-fold. If you’re interested in building your tribe and writing effective blog posts to reach others with your message, you can check out Blake’s free 7-day email challenge here.
In May 2017, I experienced a turning point in my writing. I published a post that took off on Medium and cemented my upward trajectory towards becoming a writer that people listened to, liked reading and were willing to talk to others about.
Before then, I’d been stuck at 370 email subscribers and under 1000 followers on Medium for months. I didn’t really believe I had a message worth sharing with the world. Yet I kept going due to some alien feeling in my belly telling me that the stats didn’t matter and that it was okay for me to keep writing and posting online, even if I didn’t know exactly where I wanted to be or who I wanted to become.
Although that moment when my post spread across Medium signified a concrete shift in my writing journey, it didn’t change the fact that I still had a lot of work to do as a writer online.
Even though I’d finally reached some traction with growing my audience and spreading my message, I realized then that the worst thing I could ever do as a writer would be to rest on my laurels and not move forward like I’d always been doing.
So I didn’t stop. Even with the taste of fame in my mouth, I kept moving, energized and fuelled by the growth I’d just experienced.
The Journey to Success in Our Work
Although my post never went viral and hit the Medium front page or their Twitter feed, the feedback I’d gotten from the post was significantly larger than any other post I’d done up until that moment on the platform.
In May of last year, I’d begun a 30-day writing challenge with author and writer Shaunta Grimes, who urged all of us participating to post 30 days in a row on Medium and see what results it would bring us.
At that time in my life, I was feeling pretty down, unsure anything I posted would work. So I thought, “why not?” and signed up, committed to posting every day for 30 days.
At first, I experienced little-to-no results with my writing. I was still doing 10-100 views a day, and getting around 10 recommends on an average post (which meant that 10 different people were hitting ‘like’ on my posts and hopefully reading them, too). The results were okay, but they weren’t what I was hoping for. But still, I kept going, wishing for more.
Around day 7 of the challenge, I started to feel exhausted from constantly creating new posts every day, so I cheated. I pulled up a post from my archives on Medium and reposted it to a publication on their site called The Writing Cooperative who was the only major publication to have accepted me as a writer so far and I was seeing some success with them. Of course, I edited it and shuffled things around before posting it, but things largely stayed the same.
I didn’t expect it to gain any traction whatsoever. And for the first couple hours, it didn’t really have an impact at all.
Then it began to explode. The recommends and shares were coming in and seemingly multiplying every hour, and I kept checking my feed, amazed at how they were growing and growing every day, seemingly with no effort on my part.
The results of the post culminated in about a week or so. I was left with around 300 recommends, 30 comments, and tons of shares on the post and to top it all off, a week later I hit the 1000 follower mark on my public Medium profile, which was an accomplishment I’d struggled to hit for over a year and a half to that point.
Reaching this level of success was a game changer for me. Even though I was surprised people even liked the post, I saw all of the awesome feedback people were providing me, and engaging with it allowed me to continue writing even more posts like it and piggyback off the growth my post had started earlier that year.
Fast Forward a Year
In the weeks and months that followed my 30-day challenge in May 2017, I began to receive a crazy amount of followers and feedback on my work. People were telling me they liked my writing and wanted to know more, and the feedback I received was invaluable towards helping shape my writing voice, develop my message, and hone my personal style.
Now, on an average week, I was gaining 100 followers every couple days and hundreds of recommends on my posts, many of which I’d previously published to crickets. I was seeing a massive amount of growth in my work, and it was truly crazy for me to behold.
I didn’t stop then. I kept going with my work, engaging with my followers and publishing new pieces a couple of times a week. I wasn’t willing to stop for anyone or anything, and I felt more powerful as a writer than I ever had.
What I learned during that time was invaluable. I now have over 9,000 followers on Medium and over 1500 subscribers on my email list. I’ve figured out a lot of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to blogging, and I’m here to share 10 tips with you to help you aspire to new heights too.
Here Are the 10 Things You Must Learn to Write Effectively and Reach More Readers
The truth is, to be a successful writer these days you can’t keep doing the same things you’ve done before. You need to switch it up and try new things and keep experimenting to find out what you should focus your energy on doing to grow and develop in your writing.
All of the advice I could give you couldn’t be summed up in one article. But here are the 10 most essential tenets you should know if you want to grow your platform and find attention and readers with your work, and they’re much simpler than you’d think:
1) Your writing isn’t about you; it’s about your readers. You may think your story as a writer or author is about you, but it’s not. Your story is just the instruments for your readers to pick up and learn from, and to hopefully learn something useful or pick up a different viewpoint they can apply to their lives in turn.
2) Listen to your readers and ask about their problems. I mean really listen to them. Engage them in the comments sections of your posts. Reply to their emails. Call them on Skype or on the phone and then identify the level they’re at. Never judge them or act like you’re better than your readers or talk down to them in any way. Simply ask them what they’re struggling with and use the information they give you to write posts that touch on their biggest desires, fears and obsessions and then give them something to help solve their problems and ease the most common pains and frustrations they keep telling you about.
3) Research your competitors and find the relevant data. See what’s working and what’s not working as well as it could in your topic of writing so you can stand out from others with a different style that is uniquely yours. Start analyzing headlines and look at different posts and dig down into why some posts perform well and others don’t, and then use that information to your benefit. Without the proper data, it’ll be hard to create posts that shake and inspire your readers to their core.
4) Consistently practice and hone your voice in public. You must commit to putting your work out there and set a goal to be consistent with the work you do. Without the necessary feedback and experience of writing and sharing your work with others, your writing can never grow. If you don’t have an audience, try writing for a site like Medium or guest posting on a blog you enjoy reading in your spare time. This is a valuable way to gain data about your readers and identify how you can best help them with the unique set of talents, skills, and experience that you possess.
5) Forget about niche or demographics or avatars at first. If you’re just starting out as a writer, how are you supposed to know which readers you should serve with your writing? How are you supposed to know what they look like or what they’re struggling with? How are you supposed to know what sub-topic of the marketplace you’re supposed to write in? All of this information comes from experimenting and honing your message and practicing in public, and if you commit to a genre or ‘niche’ of writing too early, you might find yourself pigeon-holed into a form of writing you don’t even enjoy. Give yourself the necessary time to find your voice, hone your style, and see what you enjoy before committing to a specific form of writing or blogging for the long-term.
6) Give your readers one thing to do after they read your post. It can be tempting to want to solve all your reader’s problems with one post, but focusing on just one problem at a time to help them with will be hugely beneficial for your writing. Once you know which problems your readers want to be solved, you can begin to give them information, tips, or strategies touch on one of their problems and give a solution to them with each post you write. Ask them to respond to you in the comments section or ponder something you wrote, but never both.
7) Remember to always keep your advice practical and actionable. Giving your readers a quick and simple action to take after reading your post is much more effective than expecting them to change their lives overnight. Most problems take months and years to solve, so think of “easing” their pain, not completely eliminating it right from the get-go, and remember not to got lost in overly fancy or flowery language as you do so.
8) Focus on the packaging just as much as the writing itself. The headline and formatting of an article matters. Use a free tool like this one here to craft a great headline to draw people in and then follow up on the promise you make in your title with the intro, body and conclusion of your post.
9) Publish your work where people will see it. It was once described to me like this: if Martin Luther King spoke on an empty platform to the people he was hoping to attract with his message, would it have made a difference? A great way to get attention and feedback for your work is by guest posting to a site like this one or publishing your work to a relevant publication on Medium, and then use those platforms to build your audience and draw them back to your work (if they’re interested, of course).
10) Underpromise and overdeliver on everything you do. This is the biggest key of all. People will underestimate you as an emerging writer online and people won’t see why they should care about your work at first. So set up your initial promises small, and then outperform your competition at every turn. If you can give your readers this initial value with your work and make them wonder why you’re giving all this information to them for free and then give them a compelling action to do next after reading your post, you’ll begin to develop long-term relationships with your ideal readers, which will in turn help you gain attention for your work.
You’re a Writer and the Time to Start is Now
Perhaps the most important thing to realize if you’re writing online is that you have to ditch what you already know about any official writing “rules” and commit to learning what you don’t know about writing effectively online.
Unfortunately, you cannot write a compelling blog post in the same way you can write a great essay. Initially, you’ll have to throw traditional grammar and paragraph structures out the window and learn an essential skill like copywriting to truly thrive online.
The good news is that writing effective blog posts and growing an audience online is easier than you think. It just boils down to learning some simple concepts and then applying them to your work. With all the practice you gain from posting, you should be able to write even better blog posts as you go.
Remember, your work isn’t about you. It’s about helping your readers ascend to the next version of their lives in whatever capacity you can help them do so.
**To get access to the popular new course “How to get Attention,” click here. It’s making a difference for those who want to get their work noticed.**
I hope you found this helpful and are ready to start sharing your work with the world, because your readers are waiting for you to stand up and help them make the change in the world they know they’re capable of.
After all, if you can help your readers solve their problems and ascend their lives, you might just become the next big writer with an audience of admiring fans behind your back, too.
