Category Archives: Blogging

Three Reasons to Take Medium Seriously

Medium Can Be the Pillar of Your Content Marketing Strategy

I expect two groups to read this post.

  1. People who are interested in Medium and the art of writing
  2. People who are interested in marketing

I’m writing this post for the people who are at the intersection of both groups.

Some people in the second group won’t be interested in creating content in written format. As I explained in a previous post, some people are better at creating content in audio and video, and others in written form.

There’s good news for both segments. Medium isn’t a text-only platform anymore. It also serves audio. More about that later.

Do You Hate Marketing?

I’m not afraid of the people in the second group. It’s the first group that I’m scared of. Some people associate marketing with evil and hate everything about it.

In the past, marketing has been abused to get the most out of people’s pockets without providing something significant in return. However, times are changing.

The New Wave of Marketing

There’s a new wave of marketing. The new wave of marketing is enabling great work to sustain itself and reach its target audience who are willing to consume it.

When I’m writing about marketing, I’m writing about the new wave of marketing, not about getting the most out of people’s pockets.

I’m interested in building a business that provides as much value as possible to its customers and receives a fraction of that value in return. Marketing is a part of this business model.

Keep Marketing out of Medium?

There’s a notion that all marketing is terrible and it must be kept out of everything that’s good, including Medium. I don’t agree with that notion.

Not all marketing is evil and decent marketing can enable great content on Medium. That’s the topic of another post that I’m going to publish tomorrow.

In this post, I want to focus on the value of Medium for content marketers. Among others, there are three reasons Medium is valuable for content marketers.

Medium Is a Content Platform

There are two types of social media platforms, content platforms and promotion platforms. Medium is a content platform.

A Medium post is 95% content and 5% promotion. Go over 5% promotion, and you have no chance on Medium.

That is good for consumers, and that’s good for content producers as well. People can immediately see whether a content producer is worth their time or not.

A content producer doesn’t need to bother with promotion, which is a secondary activity anyway. That’s why I focus on Medium as the single source of traffic for my blog.

Facebook Is a Promotion Platform

It’s almost impossible to get your content consumed on Facebook.

On Facebook, you have to create convincing promotional posts, pay Facebook to boost those posts, and hope that some people click through to your actual content. In contrast, your Medium post is your actual content.

The average Facebook user will ignore anything longer than a few sentences or a few seconds. In my experience, 6-7 minutes long Medium posts perform the best.

Audio

Medium is taking the content delivery to the next level with audio.

I consume content in two formats. When I have time, I read content in written form. Reading is an efficient way of consuming content. But I can’t read a post when I’m working out in the gym. Then, I listen to a podcast or an audiobook.

Medium combines both formats, and this is an opportunity for you. I don’t use this opportunity at the moment, but I don’t underestimate it.

If you can provide your content in two formats, in written and spoken, on the same platform, you’ll have a massive advantage over your competition.

Suppose that I follow you. I get stuck in a traffic jam. Instead of sitting there doing nothing, I can listen to your latest post, instead of waiting to arrive at home to read it.

Do you see how many other writers you’ll beat by providing the audio version of your posts?

If you record the audio versions of your posts, you can eventually broadcast them in a podcast or on YouTube as well.

Medium’s Algorithm Change

In his last post, Ev Williams, the CEO of Medium, explained the changes they made to Medium’s algorithm.

The new algorithm favors evergreen content over fresh content. This change seems to be disadvantageous in the short-term, but it’s great news in the long run.

There are enough news sites that report about the recent events. There are enough books that provide evergreen content on timeless topics such as personal development.

I also want to have something quick to read like a blog post on those timeless topics. Medium is meeting that need now. There aren’t many major platforms that do that. Medium is distinguishing itself this way.

What Are the Implications for Content Providers?

The new algorithm is good news and bad news for content providers.

It’s bad news, because your next post has to compete with the complete back catalog of Medium.

It’s good news, because if your next post succeeds at this competition, it’s going to pay dividends for the rest of your life.

I prefer long-term value over short-term benefits. Medium’s new algorithm favors this approach.

You better invest more time and effort in your next post so that you can reap its rewards for the rest of your life. If you don’t, it won’t produce any short-term benefits either.

80% of My Post Views Come from Older Posts

Last week, my Medium posts received 2701 views. 2134 of those views came from the posts that were older than a week.

You’ll need to invest a lot of time and effort in your posts upfront and won’t be able to see any rewards in the short-term. Your efforts will pay dividends in the long run.

Medium’s new algorithm will eliminate a lot of competition and make good work pay off. Our posts won’t be archived after a few weeks and then forgotten.

Conclusion

Medium is an excellent platform for content marketers who are willing to provide more value than they ask for.

If you post on Medium, you don’t have to promote your content. There is an audience willing to read excellent blog posts. If you’re good at blogging, your content finds its way to this audience.

You can include the audio versions of your posts on Medium and at least double your audience.

The new version of Medium’s algorithm will eliminate a lot of competition, but there’s a catch. You have to be willing to put in the time and effort, and be patient enough to wait for the long-term rewards.

Coming Soon…

Today’s post was about the positive sides of Medium. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll discuss the downside of Medium’s business model and Ev William’s vision.

Don’t forget to check my post tomorrow. Better yet, sign up to the email newsletter to receive a weekly roundup of my most recent posts.

Your Turn

  • Do you use Medium as a part of your content marketing strategy? If yes, how?
  • What’s your take on the audio feature and the new algorithm of Medium?

How Do I Publish a Post Every Day?

A few days ago, I was checking my Google Analytics stats. I came across several search queries by my visitors. One of those queries was “how to write every day.” That was a great topic to write a post about.

If you wonder whether I have written on a topic or not, you can use the search box on any page of my blog. You can also reach out to me directly with a comment or using the contact page.

I published a blog post per day for the last five months. That was quite a feat, if you consider that I have a full time job. I’ll go over the details of how I did it in this post.

Commitment

If you want to publish a post per day, you have to commit to it. You put this goal high in your priorities list. Only few things are more important than publishing a post per day.

If you make a commitment, you’ll find a way to publish a post per day, no matter what.

Maybe your post might not be exceptional on some days, but you will hit the publish button in either case.

2+ Hours of Uninterrupted Work Time Every Single Day

I dedicate 2+ hours exclusively to writing every single day. I don’t include interacting with readers, participating on social media, checking my stats, or improving the design of my blog in those 2+ hours.

When I say “every single day,” I mean “every single day,” including weekends and holidays.

Actually, I work longer in weekends and on holidays. I work on extra tasks such as stats, design, and email newsletters on those days.

I know that I have lost 80% of my readers at this moment, but I’m going to be honest. I’m not going to lie about my process in order to get new followers and email newsletter subscribers.

How Fast Do You Want to Reach Your Goals?

First of all, you don’t have to publish every day. I publish every day, because I want to reach my goals as fast as possible. You can publish as much as you want.

My research showed me that posts published on Monday receive twice as many views compared to the posts published on other days. That means you have to publish on Mondays. You can take a few days off in the rest of the week.

Publishing Every Day Builds Momentum

By publishing every day, you build a momentum with yourself and with your readers.

You keep your mind sharp and focused on writing. Writing becomes a fundamental part of your life. Your mind works on your posts even if you don’t think about them. You won’t get that benefit from publishing a few days a week.

Your readers know that they’ll find a new post in your blog every day. That means they can visit your blog whenever they’re bored and want something new to read. And people get bored. After a while, this becomes a habit. They visit your blog even if they aren’t bored.

You become a part of their life. They tell themselves “let me check what Burak wrote today,” because they know that you wrote something that day. This is why people check news every day.

If you take into account the momentum factor, the blogger who publishes every day has a greater advantage than just the extra few posts they publish. If they publish twice as much as the average blogger, they reach their goal faster than twice as the average blogger.

Prioritization

If your blog is up and running, don’t do anything else for your blog before publishing your post.

  • Don’t read comments.
  • Don’t read emails.
  • Don’t participate on social media.
  • Don’t improve the design of your website.
  • Don’t check your stats.

In essence, do nothing for your blog before publishing your post.

Perfect Is the Enemy of Good

I know that my blog posts aren’t perfect. I can write a good blog post in two hours. I can easily spend another two hours on improving my post and it still wouldn’t be perfect.

  • I can check my post with Grammarly, the Hemingway app, and other automated grammar and style checking tools.
  • I can read my post ten times and still find points of improvement.
  • I can google synonyms of some words.
  • I can reformat my post for greater readability.
  • I can come up with a dozen titles, run them through the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer, and decide on the best one.
  • I can write my post on one day and edit the next day.

All of these tips and others would increase the quality of my posts, but they would also increase the time it takes to publish a post. And I don’t have that much time to spend on each post.

Make no mistake, I read my posts at least three times. I use the spelling and grammar checker of MS Word. I use Grammarly, the Hemingway app, and CoSchedule Headline Analyzer once in a while to learn some lessons, but I don’t use them on a daily basis.

Keep a Backlog of Post Ideas

I wouldn’t be able to publish a post per day if I didn’t keep a backlog of ideas to write about. It would be impossible for me to come up with an idea on the spot, write a post about it, publish it, and repeat that every day.

If you have a difficult time to come up with post ideas, I strongly recommend that you read my post 8 Ways to Create Content on a Consistent Basis.

Pick an Idea and Stick to It

When you start writing a post about an idea, stick to it until you hit the publish button. Don’t go back and forth between different ideas. If you do that, you might work more than two hours and end up without a blog post.

Outline First, Write Later

When I start writing a post, I’m bombarded with ideas to include in that post. Human mind doesn’t work in a linear fashion.

My mind doesn’t come up with a single idea, wait for me to write a paragraph about that idea, and then come up with the next one.

When an idea comes up, at least half a dozen come up with it. If I start writing a paragraph about an idea, I’m going to forget about the other five or six ideas that came together with it.

Ideas don’t come in a logical sequence. They come in a bunch of tangled mess. It’s up to me to process them and organize them in a logical sequence.

First, I write down all the ideas without going into detail. That way, I don’t forget any of them. Then, I organize them in an outline.

I’m not going into details of which tools I use to outline. For details about that, you can check my post The Tools I Use to Capture and Organize Ideas, and to Outline, Write, and Edit Blog Posts.

Writing down an idea doesn’t mean that I’m going to use it in the post. Sometimes, I leave out some ideas. I keep some of those ideas to be used for future posts. I delete some of them forever.

Points of Improvement

Even though I publish a post every day, I don’t claim that my process is perfect. I have some challenges in my process. I plan to discuss my challenges and points of improvement in a future post.

If you don’t want to miss my post on my challenges and other posts on writing, blogging, startups, and life lessons, sign up to my email newsletter. I send a roundup of my latest posts in an email newsletter every week.

Conclusion

Publishing a post per day has its advantages. It builds momentum for yourself and your readers.

It all starts with a commitment to hit that target. Then, you have to prioritize it over other blogging activities.

You need to learn how to stop at good enough. If you aim for perfection, you might never publish a post, let alone once a day.

Keeping a backlog of ideas is crucial, because coming up with an idea in the last minute is not always feasible.

In order to avoid wasting time, stick with an idea when you start writing a post. Don’t switch back and forth between ideas.

Don’t try to write a post in one pass. Write down your ideas first, outline them, and write the post as the last step. That way, you won’t forget any ideas. Your posts will also have a logical sequence.

Medium Is Great for Bloggers, Readers, and Humanity, but There Is Some Room for Improvement

Medium is great for humanity, because it acts like a Trojan horse in our smartphones. Smartphones are destroying our attention span.

Short clips, streams of blurbs and pictures are replacing books. In this environment, Medium is providing an alternative to all of that digital candy.

Medium posts aren’t a replacement for a book. Most of us write our posts taking into account the short attention span of online readers.

In either case, Medium posts are much better than most of the digital candy in your pocket. It requires you to stay focused on a piece of content for a few minutes.

Medium is great for readers, because it provides readers with a steady stream of brilliant posts and the opportunity to interact with the writers and other readers.

Medium is great for bloggers, because it provides them with a large audience of readers. Personal blogs have a difficult time building an audience. This has always been the case.

With the introduction of smartphones and apps, the number of blog readers is shrinking even more. In this age, Medium is like an oasis for bloggers.

Medium Stats Teach You Lessons

Once you publish a sufficient amount of posts, you have a decent set of stats. You can use those stats to learn your lessons on blogging and to improve your craft.

Interaction with Readers

The opportunity to interact with the readers is great for the writers. I’ve been blessed with a steady stream of responses to my posts and I’m grateful for that. That feedback is critical for any content provider.

  • Comments indicate that your content is resonating with people.
  • Your readers give you a direction by telling you what they like about your posts.
  • Your readers give you new ideas to write about.

That discussion is valuable for the readers as well. They are able to influence the writers with their feedback. They can ask questions and receive answers. As a result, everybody wins.

Medium Is My Single Source of Traffic

It’s a risk for a blogger to depend on a single source of traffic. When I take into account all the benefits above, I’m willing to take that risk. As a blogger, I’m fine with using Medium as the single source of traffic to my website.

Medium Is Great for Discussions

If you read my post called Is Commenting on Medium a Reliable Strategy to Grow the Audience of Your Blog?, you might think that I changed my mind. I didn’t.

Commenting is great to interact with other writers. It’s just not an efficient way to grow your audience. Actually, I might have found why it isn’t.

A Point of Improvement for Medium

Commenting might not work, because Medium is suppressing some comments. They are probably trying to minimize spam comments this way and it works. Spam is almost non-existent on Medium.

I understand that Medium is hiding some comments, but there’s room for improvement in how Medium processes comments.

Medium Notifications Are Less Than Optimal

As a writer, I expect to receive an email for every comment I receive. That is not the case at the moment. I found that out after finding old comments by chance.

I received some decent comments written by new members. I didn’t receive an email about them. I wasn’t able to clap for them or respond to them. As a result, those comments remained hidden.

New Member Responses Are Not Notified to the Writers

How would you feel about Medium, if you signed up just to comment a post, took your time to write a decent comment, and then, your comment remained hidden and you didn’t receive a response from the writer?

Would you keep using Medium? I believe this practice hurts the new user acquisition number of Medium.

A Better Way to Display Notifications to Writers

You might say that it’s my responsibility to check my notifications and find all of those comments. Unfortunately, with the dozens of notifications I receive every day, Medium’s notifications are useless to me.

In order for them to be useful to me, they have to satisfy the following requirements.

  • They need to be accessible on a separate page of their own like Facebook.
  • I should be able to mark them as read. Now, once they are displayed on the screen, they are marked as read.

Medium iOS App Has the Best Notification Settings

Luckily, I found a workaround to this problem. In the iOS app, there are three options for push notifications for responses.

  • Off
  • Tailored for you
  • Everyone

The default is “tailored for you” and I chose “everyone.” I’ll see how this works out. I’d really like to see the “everyone” option for email notifications.

I’d like to receive an email for every response receive. That would make the task of processing responses much easier. In the meantime, if I missed a comment of you, I apologize.

Conclusion

Medium benefits bloggers, readers, and humanity in different ways. As a writer, I appreciate it so much that I use it as the exclusive source of my traffic.

There is one update I’d like to see on Medium though. That is to receive an email for every response that my posts receive.

I also suggest that Medium handles new user comments with care. Otherwise, they might lose some of those users forever.

Your Turn

If you know a tool that processes Medium notifications and creates to do lists out of them, please let me know in the comments.

Writing an About Page for My Blog

When I restarted blogging five months ago, I didn’t rewrite my about page. I didn’t write a short bio for Twitter or Medium either. I wanted my readers to make their minds by reading my posts, not by the two sentences in my short bio.

The Need for an Up-To-Date About Page

The page views of the about page of my blog is only 2% of the overall traffic. This figure looks small, but that 2% could be the most important 2%. Those visitors might be the most interested ones in my blog.

Not having an up-to-date about page can become a problem, because I write posts on a variety of topics.

My first time readers might get confused when they visit my blog or sign up to my email newsletter. They might expect posts on one topic, but receive posts on another. I want to clarify my position for my first time readers.

Which Topics to Expect from Me

The majority of my blog posts and page views are in the personal development category. Lately, I didn’t write much about this topic. This doesn’t mean that I stopped writing about this topic. Personal development is a topic that I’m interested in.

Blogging, Writing, and Marketing

Lately, I write mostly on blogging and marketing. It’s a topic that I’m trying to figure out.

I document my thinking process, my plans, and my progress. Some of my readers enjoy that insider look at my journey. Some of them give me feedback and tips. All of that helps me make my mind on how to carry on toward my goals.

Entrepreneurship and Startups

I see blogging and marketing as a part of entrepreneurship and starting up a business. Most of my posts on entrepreneurship and startups are also on blogging and marketing.

I have some posts on the inner game of entrepreneurship as well. I plan to keep writing such posts.

Topics I Stopped Writing About

There are two topics that I don’t plan to write anymore. Those two topics are management and investing.

Management of established businesses doesn’t excite me anymore. I’m more interested in starting something from scratch and turning it into an established business.

Investing

I don’t like to write about investing for two reasons. First, most people don’t have any funds to invest. Second, my investing strategy is extremely boring. I believe in dollar cost averaging and buying and forgetting until retirement.

People want to read about trading, technical analysis, and the latest cryptocurrencies. My posts don’t satisfy the “turn $100 USD to $10 million USD, buy a Lamborghini, and party with models” crowd.

Who Am I?

I’m a 39 years old software developer living in Genk Belgium. I’m originally from Istanbul, Turkey. I completed my PhD in Informatics in 2012.

Throughout my career, I’ve always been in the technical side of business. My focus was on B2B software. With my blog, I dive into the commercial side of B2C. That’s quite a switch and there’s a lot to learn.

From an Expert to a Novice

There’s a big contrast between being an expert B2B software developer and a novice B2C marketer. That’s a challenge.

I always wanted to build a business in B2C marketing, especially information marketing. This goal kept my mind busy for too long. I want to stop procrastinating on this goal and do my best to achieve it. If I succeed, that would be great. If I fail, I would let go of this goal and move on.

Using My Experience as a B2B Software Developer

Even though I’m a beginner B2C marketer, I don’t feel like I’m a complete novice. I bring all the experience in my career to my new venture.

Qualities like analytical thinking and focusing on what matters help me in this challenge. I apply the scientific method and reverse engineering to my marketing goals. I developed these qualities and experience in my B2B software development career.

Extracting Lessons from My Marketing Experience

One thing that helped me a lot is to know how to extract lessons from my experience. I spent only five months on my blog. Yet, I learned a lot about B2C and marketing. I documented those lessons in my blog.

Using B2C Marketing Lessons in B2B Software Development

The experience transfer isn’t one way. I transfer the lessons I learned from my blogging experience to my software development job.

In blogging, I don’t have time for busy work. Busy work contributes little or not at all to my end goals.

After five months of blogging, I developed an eye for what the end user would be interested and what they wouldn’t. Anything that wouldn’t interest or benefit the end user, directly or indirectly, is busy work. I try to avoid that to the extent possible.

Ease of Use

Another lesson I learned from blogging is the importance of ease of use. My blog post have to be extremely easy to read. A reader won’t read long sentences, long paragraphs, or long chunks of text.

An end user won’t be able to use complicated software, no matter how capable that software is. Now, I pay more attention on how usable a solution is before offering it to an end user.

My Marketing Goal for July 1, 2019

My goal with my blog is to build an audience of 100K Medium followers and 20K email newsletter subscribers by July 1, 2019.

This goal requires a lot of domain specific lessons to be learned. Moreover, it also requires some personal development, productivity, leadership, motivation, and entrepreneurship lessons. I’ll write on those lessons as I come up with them.

Conclusion

An up-to-date about page explains my readers who am I and what my blog is about. As the topics discussed in my blog get diversified, an up-to-date about page becomes more and more necessary.

I will use the information in this post to update my about page. Moreover, I’ll use this information to write my short bios for Medium and Twitter and the welcome email of my email newsletter.

Your Turn

Is there any information that you would like to see in an about page that I haven’t mentioned here? Let me know in the comments and I might include it in the new version.

Improving the Design of My Blog to Increase Email Newsletter Subscriptions

  • The email newsletter subscriptions in my blog don’t meet my goals consistently.
  • So far, I focused on improving my writing to optimize these results.
  • The next step will be to improve the design of my blog.

How I Measure the Performance of My Blog

I’m tracking two stats to measure the performance of my blog. These are the growth rate of my Medium followers and email newsletter subscribers. My goal is to grow both figures by 10% every week.

I succeed at the newsletter goal one week and fail the next week. This one on, one off pattern has been going on for a month now.

So far, I tried to optimize my blog post writing skills. I did that by analyzing my Medium stats. I learned a lot of lessons on blogging and I shared them in a series of posts.

Focus on Blog Design

Sure, there is still room for improvement in my writing, but I want to focus on my blog at the moment. There’s even greater room for improvement in my blog.

My traffic numbers aren’t that bad, but I have a difficult time converting that traffic into email newsletter subscriptions. I’ll focus on this conversion for a month or so.

My Knee Jerk Reaction

I started using Google Analytics to accomplish my goal. That wasn’t a good idea. I warned my readers not to jump on to a tool without having a plan first. I made that mistake. I didn’t think whether Google Analytics was the right tool for this job.

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool. When I get into a tool like that, I can spend weeks, months, and even years working on it. I could still learn something after a year of using it. However, that’s not my goal.

My goal is to improve the conversion rate of my blog, not to become a Google Analytics expert.

I warned against this type of tech abuse in the post Use Tech as an Accelerator, not as an End. I even wrote a post yesterday called Data Is the Gold If You Know How to Use It. Yet, I still spent hours on Google Analytics without any results.

Start with Pen and Paper

After hours of unfruitful work, I went away from my computer. I sat down with pen and paper. I brainstormed and wrote the first draft of this post.

Search Queries by Readers

An interesting insight from Google Analytics was the search queries people used on my website. Those search queries gave me some ideas for blog posts.

One of those search queries was “how write every day.” I think my visitor was curious about how I publish a post every day. Actually, that would be easy if I didn’t have a full time job. But it’s hard on top of a full time job.

Improving My Productivity to Keep Up with the Daily Publication Schedule

I’m still improving my productivity and workflow. I plan to report my writing routine once it reaches a certain point.

There’s some inner game that goes into this as well. I find it interesting how my psychology plays tricks on me. Then I play tricks on my psychology in return to keep up with my daily publication schedule.

If you want to read more about how I keep up with my daily schedule, stay in touch by subscribing to my email newsletter. I plan to write about this in the upcoming days.

Start with Quality Questions

After using Google Analytics for a few hours, I realized that I didn’t need to spend all of those hours. I could get what I needed in ten minutes.

Before you start to use a tool like Google Analytics, write down what you want to get out of it. Moreover, write down what you’re going to do with the answers you get.

If you don’t know the answer to those questions, you’ll end up wasting your time. At the end, you might end up knowing a lot about Google Analytics without adding any value to your business.

My Goal and How I Plan to Accomplish It

My goal is simple: to improve the conversion rate of my blog traffic to newsletter subscriptions. In order to do that, I need to improve the design of my blog.

I already worked on my writing. If the design of my blog isn’t good, I won’t be able to reach my goals no matter how good I write. The effects of both components are like factors in a multiplication.

Determine the Factor that Has the Biggest Room for Improvement

If my writing is at 80% and the design of my blog is at 20%, my conversion rate will be at 16%. After a certain threshold, improving one factor will only add marginal value.

According to the 80% – 20% figures above, there’s 25% improvement left in my writing. If I focus on my writing, I can improve my results by 25% at max.

Based on the same assumption, there’s 500% improvement potential in my website design. I can improve my results up to 500%, if I focus on the design of my website.

The Challenge of Infinite Possibilities

When I start a project such as updating the design of my website, the possibilities are virtually endless. Even though that sounds good, it is overwhelming at the same time. That’s why I wrote the post, How to Deal with the Challenge of Infinite Possibilities when Starting a Business.

Where to Start?

If it was up to me, I’d start with the about page and the homepage. But when I look at Google Analytics, I see a different picture.

If you look at the top ten pages in Fig. 1, you might think that the homepage is the most important page. It accounts for 10% of the page views. That means if I improve the homepage, I improve only 10% of my website design.

Fig. 1. Pages with top 10 views

There are eight pages that refer to blog posts in the top ten list. When I look at the complete list, more than 80% of the page views are blog post views. If I improve the design of the blog posts, I’ll improve 80% of the website.

Improving the design of the blog posts is relatively easy in WordPress. All I have to do is to update a few files in the theme that I use.

Measuring the Effects

Once I make that update, I’ll wait for a few weeks to see its effects. I can hardly think that those changes would result in a worse conversion rate than the current design.

I haven’t thought about the current design. I just used the standard theme and added a subscription box at the bottom.

Improvement Ideas

There are already some improvement ideas in my mind. These ideas are inspired by Medium and the Startup publication.

A Link to the Email Newsletter at the Top. There’s no information above the fold that indicates that I have an email newsletter. The only exception to that is the email newsletter subscription page.

I like the way the Startup Publication named their link. They called it “Get Smarter at Building Startups.” In my case, even calling this “Newsletter” would be better than what I have now.

The Position of the Subscription Box. The subscription box is under the post, social share buttons, related posts list, and the category and tags list. The subscription box could be between the social share buttons and the related posts list.

Author Information Bar. I’ll include an author information bar at the top, including my picture, my name, and a short bio. I was procrastinating on writing my Medium bio. Once I have a short bio, I’m going to use it on my blog and on Medium.

A Short Pitch in the Posts. This is not a design update, but it can increase the newsletter subscriptions. I included a pitch in this post. I gave a hint about a post that I’m going to publish in the upcoming days. I can do that in future posts as well.

Conclusion

When updating a project, focus on the component that has the biggest room for improvement. In my case, that is the design of my blog post pages.

Technology can be a pitfall at work. Don’t use a piece of technology just because it’s a good tool. Use it only if it serves your goals. Use it as a means to your ends. Don’t use it just to use it, no matter how fun it is.

Your Turn

I’d appreciate it if you could give me some tips to improve my email newsletter subscription numbers. Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas how I can improve this stat.

Why I Focus on a Single Source of Traffic for My Blog

In the last three weeks, my focus was on analyzing my Medium stats data. That taught me a lot of lessons on blogging. There is still a lot to be studied and learned from my Medium stats.

Medium is a critical part of my content marketing model. Excluding my blog and email newsletter, 90+% of my blog promotion efforts go to Medium at the moment.

My main objective is not to build a successful Medium account. My main objective is to build a successful content marketing business. A successful Medium account is a part of it.

This week, I want to analyze how my efforts on Medium serve my overall marketing goals. To do that, I will use Google Analytics stats of my blog. I will focus on the data of the last 30 days.

The First Step to Use Google Analytics

I’m not going to explain how to install and use Google Analytics (GA). I’m going to explain what to do with it. Once you know “what,” you can google “how.”

The first step to use GA is to exclude your internal traffic from the data. We don’t want our own usage to affect the results. The usage of a website admin is completely different than the usage of the average visitor. You can see that in Fig. 1 below.

Fig. 1. Google Analytics Screenshot

  • I’m one of the 929 visitors, but I account for 24% of all the page views.
  • My bounce rate is 25%. The bounce rate of the average visitor is 76%.
  • My % exit is 14%. The % exit of the average visitor is 63%.

How do I filter myself out of Google Analytics?

To find different ways of filtering your own traffic, google “Google Analytics exclude internal traffic” or “how to filter myself out of Google Analytics.”

I created a segment and filter all the views using that segment. The segment I use is Demographics, Location, City, “does not exactly match”, the name of my city. I call this segment Not My City.

This solution doesn’t take into account mobile usage, but I don’t use mobile data to access my blog that often. Moreover, it doesn’t take into account my usage when I travel.

My method of excluding my internal traffic is simple but not perfect. I have to find a better method in the future.

What is the share of Medium in my blog traffic sources?

I’m worried about being too dependent on Medium for traffic.

Being dependent on a single traffic or income source is never a good idea.

In the last ten years, I’ve seen multiple Google algorithm changes that destroyed many online businesses. I don’t blame Google for that. They have to do what’s best for their business and for their users.

Recent Changes in Medium’s Algorithm

Medium made some recent changes in their algorithm. The new algorithm seems to prefer timeless, evergreen content. I can already feel those changes in my stats.

My older Medium posts receive more hits than my recent posts. This is bad in the short term, but great in the long term.

Bad in the Short Term

I learned a lot in the last few months about converting Medium readers to email newsletter subscribers. I applied those lessons in my recent posts. Now, those recent posts receive less traffic.

Great in the Long Term

I don’t write time-sensitive content. I try to write timeless, evergreen content. Eventually, my new posts are going to receive their fair share of traffic as well.

Overall, I like the new algorithm more than the old one, even though sign ups to my newsletter dropped in the short term.

Why I Focus on Medium at the Moment

Even though I don’t like being dependent on a single traffic source, 90+% of my content marketing efforts go into my Medium account.

This might look like a contradiction and a mistake on my site. Yet, it’s a conscious choice. At this moment, I have two options.

  • Focus on Medium.
  • Spread my efforts across all social media channels.

I chose the first option. Optimizing my Medium account results in learning a lot of lessons on blogging. If I don’t learn those lessons, my blog posts will suck. If my blog posts suck, it doesn’t matter how much I promote them in other channels.

A Useful Tip for New Content Marketers

If you’re a new content marketer like me, I recommend that you focus on a single channel and learn as much as you can about that single channel. This is an advice I heard from Gary Vaynerchuk and John Chow.

Content marketing is a side project for me. I have limited time that I can invest in this project. Therefore, I need to find the most valuable activities to invest my limited time in. Optimizing my Medium account has been that valuable activity for me.

Find Your Primary Medium

Blogging doesn’t have to be your primary medium. Maybe it’s vlogging for you. Maybe, it’s podcasting. Maybe, it’s Instagram, Twitter, a Facebook page, or a Facebook group.

This is a decision you have to make. Check my post called To Vlog or To Blog? That’s the Question for the First Time Online Marketer on this topic.

Invest at Least Six Months to Your Primary Medium

Once you determine your primary medium, I recommend that you invest at least six months in perfecting your craft in that medium.

I invested five months in blogging and Medium. I learned a lot in those first five months. Yet, I’m nowhere near the optimal. I still learn something new every day.

I’ll keep focusing on blogging and Medium for at least another three months. Maybe more. Who knows, maybe I’ll stay focused on this medium for the rest of my career. That’s how much I like it.

Unrealistic Expectations

We spend four years on a college degree to get a job to make a living. Yet, most of the first time online marketers expect to make a living after the first month.

Why do you expect to make a living after a month, while it takes four years for the average person to do that? How realistic is that?

Maybe, you should invest at least three years into this craft before making a living off it.

How Dependent Is My Blog on Medium?

I thought that the traffic of my blog was at least 80% dependent on Medium. According to the Google Analytics stats, that figure turned out to be only 35%. That’s still high, but nowhere near the 80% that I suspected. That’s good news.

It is also possible that the remaining 65% comes indirectly from Medium. Here are a few indirect ways Medium might have contributed to my blog traffic.

  • Some people might consume Medium content via feed readers.
  • Some people might sign up to my email newsletter via Medium.
  • Medium import functionality might contribute to my search traffic.

Conclusion

It’s a bad idea to depend on a single source of traffic, if you have an established business.

If you’re just starting out like me, it’s OK to focus on a single medium and a single channel. That teaches you a lot of lessons that you can apply to other media and channels.

In my case, I was lucky to choose Medium. It not only sent me direct traffic, it also contributed to my blog traffic in many indirect ways.

I’m going to dive into my Google Analytics stats further and report my findings here. So, stay tuned for more on this topic.

Your Turn

  • How do you measure the impact of your social media activities on your website traffic?
  • Do you have any tips about using Google Analytics?

How Accurate is CoSchedule Headline Analyzer?

  • CoSchedule’s headline analyzer is a popular tool among bloggers.
  • I tested it with 82 blog posts of mine that were published in the Startup Publication.
  • The scores of the headlines don’t correspond to the number of views of my post.
  • Still, there are some valuable lessons to be learned from the tool.

The Three Most Recommended Tools

Two weeks ago, I analyzed my Medium stats and published a series of posts about the results.

Getting published in a major Medium publication is the biggest factor in getting views. The title of a post is the second biggest factor. I published a few posts to come up with titles that get clicked.

After I published those posts, I received a lot of recommendations for three tools.

  1. Grammarly.com
  2. The Hemingway App
  3. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

The Hemingway App was so good that it entered my standard toolbox.

Grammarly

I still have to try Grammarly. I’m postponing this, because it doesn’t have an easy access trial version like the Hemingway App.

Grammarly requires installing a plugin in my browser. Firefox warned me against that. Installing the plugin means that Grammarly can see everything I type into my browser.

As I have explained in my post about privacy, I don’t want that. I’ll find another way to try out Grammarly.

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

Today, I wanted to give the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer a try. The results are mixed. It has its strengths and weaknesses.

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer didn’t enter my standard toolbox. Yet, I’m going to use it from time to time. There are lessons to be learned from it.

What is CoSchedule?

CoSchedule is an online marketing management tool. You can use it for the following purposes among others.

  • Plan and automate your marketing efforts.
  • Track your results.
  • Manage your team.

The Need for an Automated Marketing Management Tool

I haven’t tried CoSchedule yet, but I get the need for such a tool. I’ll write a separate post about automating marketing management. I could use such a tool, but I want to write down my requirements first.

Promoting Your Online Business with Free Tools

It’s a shrewd strategy to promote your online business with free tools. People like to use such tools and they recommend it to each other.

The headline analyzer is one of the tools in the toolbox of CoSchedule. They give free access to it in exchange for your contact information.

Headline Analysis Criteria

I expected this tool to give me a score and a few tips. It gave me a thorough report besides the score. It checks the title for the following factors.

  • Word Balance
  • Headline Type
  • Length Analysis
  • First Three, Last Three Words
  • Keywords
  • Sentiment
  • Google Search Preview
  • Email Subject Line Preview

Some of the factors have links to blog posts with more details. I haven’t read those blog posts yet, but they are now on my reading list.

Let’s go over each factor and let me share my observations.

Word Balance

The idea here is that you have four types of words in your title.

  1. Common
  2. Uncommon
  3. Emotional
  4. Power

You need to balance those word types in your title. The tool recommends a certain percentage for each word type. Please check the tool for specific percentages for each word type.

I like the idea of balancing word types, but the tool doesn’t categorize all the words in my titles. As a result, the total of the words in each category doesn’t add up to 100%. That makes me question the accuracy of the final score.

Moreover, it categorizes words such as “skill” and “focus” as emotional.

The tool doesn’t recognize words conjoined by an apostrophe. For example, it recognizes “re” at the end of “you’re” as a separate word.

Headline Type

The tool recognizes several headline types. It recognized the following types in my titles.

When it recognizes a headline type, it gives you a green tick. If it doesn’t recognize a headline type, it gives you a warning sign and calls your title “generic.” I don’t like that conclusion.

First of all, it suggests that all blog posts should fit one of the predetermined templates. Sure those templates can help you come up with new blog post ideas.

Why should I follow them every time I write a blog post? Where is the creativity in that?

Moreover, “how to” titles don’t perform well in my experience. I believe that they are overused and people became immune to them. They don’t stand out in the crowd of other blog posts.

Length Analysis

This was one of the most insightful of the factors. The headline analyzer recommends titles that are approximately 55 characters and 6 words long. That makes sense to me.

If you want to include more information than that, break the title into two. Add the second part as a subtitle in italics to the content. That way, the title is not too wordy and the subtitle is still featured in preview cards.

First Three, Last Three Words

This was the absolute eye opener for me. People tend to read the first and last three words of a title. Do those words say enough about your post? Or are they common words?

Keywords

I get that you have to include strategic keywords in your blog post title. But the keywords that the headline analyzer pulled out didn’t convince me. It featured “I” and “re” of “you’re” as keywords among others.

Sentiment

I agree with the idea behind this factor. The more emotionally charged your title is, the more readers it’s going to pull in.

The headline analyzer tells you whether your title has a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. Having a negative sentiment isn’t bad, because that has an emotional charge too.

Sometimes, I’m criticized for using too strong words in my titles. For example, This Is What I Learned from My Most Hated Blog Posts. Nevertheless, those strong words pull readers in.

Google Search Preview & Email Subject Line Preview

I find both previews helpful.

How Accurate Is It?

This is the most important question about this tool. I can only answer it according to my own data. I tested it on 82 blog posts that I have written and that were published in the Startup Publication.

As I mentioned above, the details of some factors are not accurate. The overall score reflects those inaccuracies.

I compared the view numbers of my posts with the headline analyzer scores. The correlation was only 11%. You can see in Fig. 1. that there are no relations between both data.

Fig. 1. Scatter Chart. Headline Analyzer Overall Score vs Number of Views

This result might be my mistake. I normalized my data by using posts only from one publication.

I could normalize the data for the day of the week as well, because posts published on Monday tend to outperform the rest.

In either case, I expect a high correlation between the number of views and the overall headline score. Without that correlation, I won’t use this tool on a daily basis.

Conclusion

An automated headline analyzer is a great idea. I learned some important lessons from it. I’m going to visit it in the future to learn more. Yet, there is some room for improvement in this tool.

Points of Improvements

  • Categorization of words in Word Balance
  • Recognition of words conjoined with an apostrophe
  • It recognizes some simple words as keywords.
  • The overall score has almost no correlation to the view numbers of my posts.

If CoSchedule addresses these points, their headline analyzer can be a useful tool.

Positive

In some extreme cases, it gave me accurate points:

It’s an educational tool. I learned about the optimal word balance, title length, and the importance of the first and last three words.

Future Work

Here is a follow up action list for me. I’m especially curious about #2 and #3. I’m going to post about them as well.

  1. Read the blog posts linked by the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer.
  2. Use and Review Grammarly. What’s the added value on top of MS Word grammar and spell checker?
  3. Write down my requirements for an automated marketing tool.

Your Turn

  • Have you used CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer?
  • What do you think about it?
  • Do you use it for every post?
  • Are there other tools that you use and recommend?

The Read Ratio Is the Key to Convert Viewers to Fans

I analyzed seven factors that affected my Medium stats and published my findings in a series of blog posts. I thought yesterday’s post would be the last one in this series. I planned to wait for another 100 posts to collect new data and make a similar analysis.

I was wrong. My study of the stats was incomplete. I only analyzed the views and fans. I ignored the reads. I tried to rationalize that decision while writing yesterday’s post. I couldn’t.

There was no rational reason to ignore the reads. On the contrary, the reads were slightly more correlated to the fans than the views. The correlation between the views and fans is 91.9% and the correlation between the reads and fans is 92.4%.

Fig. 1. Fans vs. Views

You can see this difference, if you look carefully at the scatter graphs in Fig. 1 and 2. The points in Fig. 2 are slightly “tighter” than the points in Fig. 1. That means we better pay attention to the read stats as well.

Fig. 2. Fans vs. Reads

The reads act like a bridge between the views and fans.

Analyzing the Read Stats

This time, I don’t want to randomly dive into the analysis like I did with the views and fans. I want to make a structured analysis based on the results from the previous study.

I’ll come up with a set of hypotheses to test with the data. While doing these tests, I might come across hypotheses that I haven’t thought about. I’ll report them too.

Here’s an overview of the factors that I’ll analyze.

Publication the Post Is Published In

This is an interesting factor. My posts get 10 times more views when they are published in the Startup publication. However, that 10X factor doesn’t translate to fans. My posts get four times more fans in the Startup publication.

The readers of the Startup publication have higher expectations from a post. I will analyze those expectations. I will work on increasing the reads to views and fans to views ratios of my posts in the Startup publication.

The Title of the Post

The title of the post plays a great role in pulling in readers. My initial studies show that it also plays a role in the read ratio.

If the title charges the reader emotionally, the read ratio seems to be higher. However, this emotional charge is a double edged sword.

The reader could hate your argument and read your post to see how wrong you are. Or they could love your argument and read it to maximize their positive experience. You can see this in the number of fans.

Unfortunately, there are no reaction buttons like Facebook on Medium. An angry face or a heart say much more than the number of claps. That’s a downside of Medium, but that’s the subject of a different post.

Post Length

I read claims about a strong correlation between post length and read ratio. Based on my conclusions from the fans to views ratio, I don’t think that would be the case. I don’t have any evidence at this moment. This will be one of the hypotheses that I’ll test with the data.

Readability of a Post

I believe this will be one of the top two factors that affect the read ratio. The other one is the emotional charge of the post.

My initial observations point out that increasing the readability of web copy is harder than I thought. More on that in the future posts.

Day of the Week and Tags of the Posts

Honestly, I have no idea whether the day of the week or tags play a role in the reads to views ratio. That’s a good thing. Starting an analysis with an open mind is always better than starting with a set of beliefs.

The Right Mindset to Approach Research

Even though I have some beliefs about the impact of some of these factors, I don’t do this analysis to prove myself right.

I’d rather be wrong, learn something, and improve my stats than prove myself right.

The Pitfall of Optimizing Your Stats

There’s a pitfall when analyzing and optimizing your Medium stats. You can end up overoptimizing a stat or two.

These stats are important and they add value to a content marketing business. They need to be seen in that context.

It is possible to overoptimize a parameter at the cost of others. For example, I can write an irritating piece and increase the read ratio. However, that high read ratio won’t translate to fans, followers, and email newsletter subscribers.

Conclusion

The read ratio turned out to be more important than I initially thought. That means I’m going to analyze the impact of different factors on the read ratio.

I believe the emotional charge and the readability of a post would have the highest impact on the read ratio. I’m especially curious about how I can improve the readability.

I believe there are a lot of lessons to be learned in the readability of web copy. Those lessons have probably a high impact on the bottom line of a content marketing business. For that reason, I’m going to analyze the readability next. I’ll publish my lessons here.

Your Turn

  • What do you think about the importance of the read ratio of a post?
  • What are the factors that impact the read ratio? Did I miss a factor here?
  • Do you have any suggestions for this analysis?
  • Is there any factor that you want me to look at when analyzing the read ratio stats?

I Analyzed Seven Factors that Affect My Medium Stats. This Is What I Found.

Medium provides us with three stats, number of views, reads, and fans for each post. The read ratio doesn’t seem to provide any extra information on top of these.

You can do a lot with these three stats. You can learn a lot of lessons from them. I’ve spent analyzing these stats for the last ten days. I published a series of posts on lessons I learned from them. This is the tenth post in this series.

My interpretation of views and fans is as follows. The number of views shows how successful a post is in pulling in readers. The number of fans shows how successful a post is in satisfying the readers.

I see the number of reads as a bridge between views and fans. The number of reads deserves its own analysis. I’m going to do that in the future and I’m going to publish my lessons. This post will be about views and fans.

In order to analyze my stats, I downloaded them with this script (Third party link and script. Please use it on your own risk).

I did some extra manual work, such as adding the publications and tags to the posts. I wrote a small program to avoid some manual work. If you can’t program, you can do the same work manually, by copying and pasting in Excel.

To give you an idea, I had more than 140 posts in my Medium profile at the time of this analysis.

Which Factors Impact Medium Stats?

In order to optimize my Medium stats, I need to know which factors impact them. Here is the list of the factors that I analyzed. If you think that there might be other factors affecting Medium stats, please let me know in the comments.

  • Publication the post is published in
  • The title of the post (*)
  • Post length (*)
  • The likability of the post, including its readability
  • Day of the week the post is published on (*)
  • Tags of the post (*)
  • Featured picture of the post (*)

My posts published in the Startup publication received 10x more views compared to the rest. In order to subtract the impact of that factor, I analyzed only the posts that are published in the Startup publication when analyzing the factors marked with (*).

Publication the Post Is Published In

According to my stats, getting published in a major Medium publication, the Startup, made the biggest change in my views and fans. It multiplied my views by 10 and my fans by 4.

The Title of the Post

Getting published in a major Medium publication gives a huge boost to your views and fans, but why stop there?

You can still optimize your stats by coming up with strong and counterintuitive titles. The title of a post has a huge impact on the views. I published three posts about writing impactful titles.

The Likability of the Post

I measured the likability of the post as the ratio of fans to views. The factors that make a post less popular are the following:

  • Incongruent title and content
  • Unbelievable claims
  • Arguments unpopular with the target audience
  • Low readability

I explained the details of each factor and gave several examples in the post This Is What I Learned from My Most Hated Blog Posts.

I use the Hemingway App to measure and improve the readability of my posts. You can see the details and an example screenshot in this post.

Featured Picture of the Post

Believe it or not, I checked my top 10 and bottom 10 posts for the pictures. I liked most of those pictures equally. I think they play a role, but I can’t measure it in my posts.

I’m convinced that each blog post has to have a relevant, beautiful picture at the top. Make sure this is at the top. Otherwise, Medium doesn’t display it in the preview card. This happened to me once.

You can find free pictures on Pixabay. Make sure you give credits to those photographers via a link.

Day of the Week the Post is Published On

This is one of the more interesting results I came across. Monday seems to be the prime time to publish a post, but that doesn’t mean you have to ignore the remaining days.

The posts published on Monday seem to get the 30% of the total views and fans. There is no reason to assume that the posts published in the weekend underperform the rest.

Fig. 1. Views and Fans vs Day of the Week

I came up with two conclusions from this data.

  • Publish my best content on Monday.
  • Publish on every day of the week.

Post Length

When I look at Fig. 2, posts that are six minutes long received the most views and fans. However, the fan to view ratio is the maximum when the post was seven minutes long.

Fig. 2. Views and Fans vs Post Length

To be honest, I didn’t normalize these values for other factors such as day of the week. Maybe, I’m just publishing longer posts on Mondays, because I have more time to write them in the weekend. This is something I have to look into as future work.

Until then, I’m going to stick with posts that are six to seven minutes long.

Tags of the Post

This was a difficult one to analyze. First, I had to fill the tags one by one. Then, I had to write a program to process these numbers. Finally, I realized that my more recent posts didn’t reach their full potential in views and fans yet.

As a result, I’m not 100% sure that the results of this analysis are accurate. I include them as reference for future work.

Fig. 3. Views and Fans vs Tags

The tags are sorted according the number of fans, the orange columns. The blue columns refer to the number of views.

People interested in startups don’t seem to click much on my posts, but the ones they do tend to like it more than the people that are interested in management.

In this analysis, I only used the tags that had more than ten posts. There are other tags with less than ten posts. I will use some of those tags in the future, such as leadership. I’m curious how they will perform.

The results are not clear in this one. I’m going to make a similar analysis in the future.

Factors that I Haven’t Analyzed

There are some factors that I haven’t analyzed in this study. I don’t know how to analyze them at the moment, such as the number of followers when a post was published.

I have no impact on some of them, such as getting a high number of initial claps from the editors of the publication.

I’m not going to experiment with some of them, such as consistency of publishing posts or interactions with the readers via responses. I’m not going to ignore reader comments just to measure the impact.

  • Timing of acceptance to the publication
  • Number of followers of the writer
  • Getting a high number of initial claps from the editors of the publication
  • Interactions with the readers via responses
  • Consistency of publishing posts, including tags

Conclusions

Here are the lessons I learned after all the analysis I have done.

  • Do my best to get published regularly in the Startup publication.
  • Come up with strong and counterintuitive titles.
  • Aim for posts around 6 – 7 minutes.
  • Pay attention to the likability of the post, including its readability.
  • Publish my best content on Monday, but keep publishing on every day of the week.
  • Pay attention to the tags.
  • Experiment with tags that I don’t use often.
  • Pay attention to the picture of the post.
  • Respond to user comments.
  • Keep publishing a post per day, focusing on the better performing tags.

When looking at these results, please take into account that they are based on my posts and my audience. Maybe your posts and your audience like 3 minute posts more than 6 minutes posts. Or they’d click your posts about startups more than management.

So, please use these results as information only. Do your own analysis if you can and please let me know if you publish it.

Future Work

  • Normalize the stats such as length vs day of the week.
  • Analyze the read stats.
  • Download the stats every week and do a week over week analysis.
  • Try to find a way to use the number of followers when a post is published in the analysis.

Acknowledgement

I thank my mastermind partner David Nowak for giving me the idea to look at my Medium stats.

Your Turn

Please let me know what you think about this analysis and conclusions.

  • Are there other factors that would play a role in Medium stats?
  • Did you do a similar analysis yourself?
  • If so, what are the lessons you’ve learned?
  • If not, are you inspired to do a similar analysis yourself?

The Tools I Use to Capture and Organize Ideas, and to Outline, Write, and Edit Blog Posts

Since November 2017, I wrote and published a blog post per day. In case you wonder, I’m not a full time blogger. This is something I do in my spare time, next to my full time job.

How was I able to publish a blog post per day?

To be honest, this wasn’t easy. Sure, I could write down whatever crossed my mind and call it a post. I did not take that easy path. I wanted my posts to provide value long after I wrote them.

It takes me three steps to write a blog post.

  1. Capture ideas
  2. Organize ideas
  3. Write a post

I explained the details of these steps in the post Four Steps to Becoming a Published Author. The fourth step is about writing and publishing a book. I decided not to take the fourth step before I built a full size audience.

By a full size audience, I mean 100K Medium followers and 20K email newsletter subscribers. It’s a goal I plan to achieve in 15 months. Check the post How I Use Growth Metrics to Optimize the Stats of My Blog and Email Newsletter for more details.

Throughout the time, I experimented with different tools for each step. Lately, I divided the third step into three smaller steps, as you can understand from the title of this post.

Capturing Ideas

We all come up with at least ten ideas every day. Some of these ideas are repetitions. Some of them are fresh insights. In either case, when the inspiration strikes, it’s important to capture those ideas.

I use Evernote to capture ideas. It’s the app that I use the most. Its free version is good enough to use with a computer and smartphone combination. I have two Evernote accounts, one for my private projects, and one for my job. I can’t imagine a life without Evernote.

Organizing Ideas

Capturing ideas is great, but it’s 10% of the work. 70% of my blogging efforts go to organizing ideas. If you come up with 10 ideas, you end up with 70 ideas at the end of the week. Human brain is chaotic. Those ideas don’t come in a structured way. They are all over the place.

I write ideas about business, blogging, my private life, and a dozen different topics. Organizing ideas involves dividing them into different notes. Then, I have to group relevant ideas in a note together.

Sometimes, I have to delete duplicate ideas and the ones that I have already published. Once I have done this work, it’s much easier to write a blog post.

Outlining a Blog Post

In the past, I started to write a blog post in a text editor. I wrote down my ideas as they flowed from my mind. As a result, writing a blog post was hard, inefficient, and chaotic. I had to restart a post multiple times. Sometimes, I got lost in the middle of the post.

Sometimes, I started a blog post and ended up writing another post, because my mind jumped from subject to subject. My blog posts didn’t have the logical flow I wanted them to have. I realized that I had to come up with an outline before starting to write a post.

I started to use FreeMind for that purpose. FreeMind is an open source, free software. It’s great for brainstorming. I dump my ideas in there and organize them by dragging and dropping the nodes.

Fig. 1. Blogging Lessons Mind Map

Sometimes, many posts come out of a single mind map. You can see an example mind map in Fig. 1. I have already written seven blog posts from the ideas in that mind map. The eighth one is in the queue.

Adding More Structure

FreeMind is great to brainstorm ideas, but it doesn’t feel natural to outline a blog post. A text editor isn’t the perfect tool for this task either. I have three requirements to outline my blog posts.

  • Process text naturally, like a text editor.
  • Easily move around ideas, like a mind mapping software.
  • Focus on a single idea, when I need to.

Neither Evernote, nor FreeMind, nor any other software I know of meet those criteria. I experimented with the Guide and Scrivener for this purpose.

Luckily, I came across Workflowy a few years ago. It satisfies all the three criteria above. It’s a freemium software and I use the Windows client.

Fig. 2. Blog Post Outline in Workflowy

I have a blog post template in Workflowy (Fig. 2). Before starting a post, I duplicate that template and outline the post in that template. Once the outline is complete, I start writing the blog post.

Writing the Post

In the past, I used LibreOffice Writer to write my blog posts. I liked its autocomplete functionality. However, the advantages of MS Word outweighed the autocomplete functionality of LibreOffice Writer. So, I use MS Word to write my blog posts. I’m not going back soon.

Literary Critic as an App

Once the blog post is complete, it’s time to edit it. I read it several times, format it, make corrections, and add pictures and links.

Formatting for readability is crucial for likability of your blog posts. Check the post This Is What I Learned from My Most Hated Blog Posts for more details. I go for short paragraphs, short sentences, and occasional quotes.

Like everybody, I have my blind spots too. It’s a great idea to have your blog post checked for readability. Luckily, there’s an app for that: the Hemingway App.

I thank my mastermind buddy David Nowak for introducing that app to me. That’s one of the dozens of helpful tips he gave to me.

Fig. 3. Feedback received from the Hemingway App

If you wonder what kind of feedback the Hemingway App provides, check Fig. 3. That screenshot comes from an earlier post of mine. It was an eye-opener to get my writing analyzed by the Hemingway App for the first time.

I learned a lot of lessons from the Hemingway app after the first use. I pay attention to those shortcomings. I do my best to not repeat them in the future.

Conclusion

Blogging might look like the easiest thing to do. But publishing a blog post day after day and providing solid value in each of them is hard.

I wouldn’t dare to work toward that goal if I didn’t follow a step by step process. Evernote, FreeMind, Workflowy, MS Word, and the Hemingway App are the tools that enable that process.

Even though I’m enthusiastic about these tools, I’m always open to new ones. So, I want to read your opinion too.

  • What are the steps you take to write a post, article, or a book?
  • Which tools do you use for each step?