The Write Way — AMA #1
All your writing-related questions answered in one place!
Hello lovely #TheWriteWay community
Welcome to our first-ever AMA — the monthly “Ask Me Anything” that we host first as a Twitter Space.
If you missed this month’s Space, head over and listen to the recording today. We’ll host a Space every month on the last Friday of that month, so definitely join us, and set your calendars accordingly.
This post is a collection of all the questions we discussed on #TheWriteWay AMA on Twitter on Friday, 25th March 2022. We were supposed to send this email your way a few days ago, but I got delayed as my phone was lost and I was too stressed to do anything else. I’m in a better place now, and finally ready to share all the awesomeness of our AMA with you.
Read on for some truly valuable insights, and make sure you have a pen and paper ready, because you might need to take lots of notes!
1. If you could choose only one social media platform to write, which would it be?
That’s a very great question. And it’s especially relevant in today’s times because there are so many social media platforms and writers are trying to build a brand everywhere.
The answer to this question would be different depending on what you are looking for. Say, for example, if you want to eventually write a book someday and you are trying to build an audience before you go and write that book, you would have to choose a platform where most of your intended target audience hangs around, right? Most of the readers that I’ve seen hang around on Facebook. In this case, Facebook would be a great place to start.
If you’re looking to do content marketing or freelance writing for great clients, then Twitter and LinkedIn can be amazing platforms because the CEOs of so many companies hang around on these platforms.
Personally, if I had to choose only one social media platform to write, I would definitely choose Twitter. Because I’ve been active on Twitter, like really active, as in, six tweets a day active on Twitter since last two weeks, and I’ve seen incredible growth. I got like 50 new followers in just 2 weeks, which is incredible.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this journey pans out here. If you are interested in starting a career as an online writer, I would say Twitter is an amazing place to start your journey.
As you said Twitter has been sort of like a goldmine for me because, to be honest, for a long, long time, I haven’t been really serious on Twitter. But as you can see, we are hosting the Twitter spaces right now, and I’m being more and more active on Twitter.
As long as I can see one of the biggest benefits of Twitter, if you are thinking about whether you want to start on Twitter or not, is that the personal interactions that you can get with your audience are just completely invaluable. You can get to know the problems of your readers or your customers, whatever you’re doing, whether you’re selling a digital product or just writing in general.
And those insights will be very helpful and will save you months of effort in trying to figure out what your readers really want. That’s one thing I wanted to add from my own experience.
2. How do you pack value into one tweet in just 280 characters?
A lot of it has to do with just being able to write.
Since I’ve been writing for a long time now, some of these problems come very intuitively to me. This is because I know what writers may struggle with because I have also struggled with that. So I am able to put my finger on the exact pain point that I want to relate to my readers.
The second thing is that I’ve also had some practice on other social media platforms. At this point, the social media algorithms are not new to me.
I’m afraid there are no specific tips or tricks I can give you. But just being more natural can be the biggest differentiator and help you stand out on Twitter. You don’t have to be very formal as you may have to be on LinkedIn or any other social media channel.
Summing up, try to be very natural so that people can relate to you, and that’s what makes a tweet valuable in my opinion.
3. If you could go back to Day One of your writing journey on medium, what would you change? What were your personal mistakes and hard-learned lessons?
I think, for the most part, I wouldn’t change anything because I’ve had a lot of fun, to be honest, on Medium.
When I joined Medium, I was more passionate about writing, while what I saw in other people was a desire for short-term success and making money immediately.
That is something which I saw on the platform as a whole, whether you talk about in terms of the articles that I would see on my homepage or just our different writer groups that I was in. People were discussing how to make money and so on.
For the first six months, try to forget your stats and earnings
What’s really happening at that time is that imagine you’re swimming underwater. For someone who’s looking from the top of the swimming pool, they can’t see how much progress you are making.
Imagine you’re standing on the top of the swimming pool and if someone is swimming from down below, they might be making a lot of progress, but nothing is visible. So that’s what’s happening in the first six months.
I was very fortunate that someone told me that, and I took that as a very core principle of my writing journey. That has really benefited me now.
In terms of what I would change is perhaps I think a couple of things that may or may not dramatically change the course of my journey, but still, if I could go back, I would be interested in seeing what effect they would have.
1. Being more intentional with my headline
If I would have been more intentional, perhaps I would have generated more traffic, more readership or earnings, etc.
2. Having an editor/accountability partner
I’ve often wondered what would happen if I would have someone like an editor or a serious accountability buddy, so they can help me shorten my learning curve and improve a lot faster.
What happens is sometimes when you start focusing on producing a lot of quantity, you might start to get into certain bad writing habits.
If there is no one to tell you that it’s a bad habit, then you can get to a place where it’s very hard to change that. If you could get a friend or a fellow writer to give honest feedback, this could be a game-changer in terms of how quickly you progress on the platform.
4. Does the Medium algorithm promote self-published articles as much as the ones that are published in publications?
I’ve seen both kinds of successes.
I’ve seen some folks only self-published their articles and achieved great successes. I’ve also seen folks who have stuck to the big publications and earn a lot of money.
You’ll see success stories of both kinds on Medium.
I’ve tried everything on the scale. What I’ve noticed is that even if your article is curated, when you self-publish it, the chances of it gaining traction and really blowing up are very low.
The reason for that is your article is only shown to your audience. So there’s no exposure to a wider audience. The thing with publications is that it can work some wild magic if the publication’s theme aligns with the niche of your article.
Most people think it’s only the size of the publication, and the larger it is, the better. That isn’t the case.
It depends on three main factors:
1. Target audience
How similar are the target audiences of your article and the audience of the publication?
2. Publishing frequency
How active is the publication, as in how many articles were published in a day?
Let’s say a publication publishes 100, 200, or 300 articles in a day. Your work might just be lost in a sea of published content. This is like taking a shot in the dark. You either get a lot of traction by chance or your article just gets drowned.
3. How engaged the publication’s audience is
Wholistique is a small publication, which has 4,000 something followers. Books Are Our Superpower has 13,000 followers.
Both of those, despite being small publications, has given me great success. The reason is the quality of the audience.
This depends on the editors; on how good they are and how carefully they curate the publication’s content.
In a nutshell, publishing in publications definitely seems to be better than self-publishing. If there is a piece that you think won’t fit into any publication and you have to self-publish, then I would say, go ahead.
Otherwise, it’s better to find a publication that suits the niche of your article.
5. What are your personal reasons behind starting a newsletter?
This is a very interesting and very important question for not just writers on Medium, but for writers everywhere.
I’m being very honest here. I didn’t start a newsletter with any goal in mind. I just was advised that writers should have newsletters. So, I just blindly created a newsletter. That’s it.
But now that I have started doing business with my newsletters, I have come to understand that it’s such a powerful tool for writers.
A newsletter is algorithm-independent
With a newsletter, you have an ownership over your community. You’re not dependent on any algorithm. You don’t have to wonder if all your audience will actually see your stuff or not, because it’s going directly to their inboxes. You can write anything and they will definitely read your readers will definitely read it.
Now, if I had to start a newsletter again from scratch, the only reason I would do it is because I want a different source of income. A newsletter can be a very powerful income source as a writer. There are so many ways you can monetize it.
The reason to start a newsletter was that I wanted to get to know my readers better. In the past, I have created products and videos without knowing my audience.
I spent a lot of time creating them, but when I launched, I thought if millions of people will read my article, thousands of people will buy my course. But it didn’t happen. The problem behind all of this is that I never really spent time getting to know my audience.
Get to know your audience better
Email gives me that control and also a point of interaction with my readers wherein they can tell me what they’re liking in my newsletter. Then, on the basis of what content they are liking, I also know what kind of people I have in my list. I know what kind of readers I have in general, and this tremendously helps in writing content and building products that will benefit my audience.
This was one of the biggest reasons I started a newsletter. Let’s say if you’re writing on Medium, apart from the comments, Medium doesn’t make it easy for you to build a conversation with your readers.
That can only happen if you take them on your email list or some other platform like Twitter.
I would second everything that you said. Everyone was talking about how important a newsletter is for writers. So I started off with no intention, just for collecting emails.
The name of my first newsletter is A Better Life. It was just a generic newsletter aimed at no certain demographic or anything.
But down the lane, I got an idea for something that I potentially wanted to build in the future. So for that, I started a second newsletter, which is more intentional and is targeted towards only young men. Of course, there are women and older men too, but then 70–80% of the demographic, which I’m trying to target, are young men.
I would say there are only three reasons for starting a newsletter:
- Down the line, you would want to monitize a newsletter in the form of a paid newsletter. A lot of bigger artists have done this. Zat Rana, for example, used to be big on Medium, but then he switched to Substack where you have direct access to your readers.
- You don’t have to cater to any algorithm. You don’t have to water down your content or stick to any rules. It’s just the Wild West and you can play whatever you want.
- Creating a particular kind of audience and getting them acclimatized to consuming content by you and basically building trust. What you would do is you would try to turn these subscribers into customers for your products or services.
Even if you don’t have a reason, I would still say collecting emails is valuable. Down the lane, even if you have a genetic newsletter where you just share updates of your progress, if some idea hits you, you don’t have to start from zero.
From the first day that you start writing, the readers that come on your article or on your LinkedIn or Twitter posts, once they leave that, you don’t have any way to get back to them.
A newsletter is just a way to capture their attention, capture their email, and for them to basically start building a friendship or relationship with you.
Otherwise, you just lose them and you can’t really get them back once they have left your article.
Whether it’s a book you’re selling or article you’re writing or a social media post, once they comment, they are gone. But with an email list, you can contact them again and again and again, and it just prolongs the relationship and makes it more solid, which is always valuable.
If you can plan a newsletter properly, it can become a very powerful way of branding yourself as well as earning some money as a writer.
6. Is it worth trying to pitch on Upwork or Fiverr as a rookie considering the low rate of return for the time investment?
Or is it better to focus on creating content on a platform like Medium LinkedIn and later pitching clients for freelance work after making it relatively big?
This is a very important question so many writers have. I wish there was a right answer to this, but the reality is that the experience varies for every writer.
I know writers personally, who started on Upwork and they got to earning four figures a month within just like 5–6 months after pitching on Upwork. And I know people who were pitching on Upwork for like 5 years and still they don’t get any decent gigs.
For a platform like Upwork or Fiverr or any other freelancing platform, if you want to get success there, you actually have to spend a lot of time on that platform to understand which kind of freelancers get selected for high-paying gigs and which kind of freelancers keep doing low paying gigs forever.
Once you spend time on the platform, you analyze the people who are successful. If you apply those results, it’s definitely possible to get good gigs on Upwork.
Personally, I’ve never succeeded or Upwork. Whenever I pitch for a gig, they always reject me thinking I am a new freelancer. I have nothing to show because on Upwork I have no previous record or client reviews there. So, nobody’s willing to pay me higher rates right now.
Whether platform you choose, you need to be patient, build a portfolio, and then you can start reaching clients.
But the alternative that you suggested, like build a personal brand on a platform like Medium or LinkedIn — that can be insanely powerful.
In the initial times you might not earn any money, but if you write on a platform for one year, you will inevitably have some social proof too, in the form of a follower count or a strong portfolio.
Then, you can pitch to brands or companies that are relevant to your niche. And then you can tell them something like-
“Hey, I already write about this topic. I have so much experience, just look at my Medium blog. I would love to write for you. Are you looking for a content writer for your website?”
With this, your success rate with definitely increase.
This is the exact path I took. I didn’t start freelancing at the beginning of my career. I started it when I already had like an established presence online. I noticed the clients were happy to pay whatever rates I asked because they already saw my social proof, that so many people are reading my work.
You can take either of these two routes when you’re starting, whichever works for you, but neither is easy. You have to spend at least one year working on yourself and building your profile before you can actually get amazing money.
This is, I think, true for like every platform on the internet.
The thing about building a presence up on a platform or multiple platforms is that, once you start seeing the money rolling, you stop undervaluing your work.
Us freelancers are notorious for underpricing ourselves.
But the thing is, once you start seeing good money on platforms such as these, you start valuing yourself more. And even if you were to take up gigs, you would only take up ones that are worth your time.
7. How do you plan your content calendar?
I think managing your content calendar is the one thing that if you do it right, you don’t really have to worry about a lot of the other things that you see writers stressing about.
So the first thing I do is, I ideate on a regular basis.
I try to ideate by writing down 10 ideas a day. We all have heard about James Altucher’s practice of writing 10 ideas every day. After doing that for more than a year now, I’ve had a lot of ideas.
So, yes, to be honest, I don’t ideate now every day though. I want to get back to it. But the point is that you need to ideate regularly. You need to capture ideas regularly. That is the first thing.
The second thing is that you need to outline your ideas.
This is very important because for most writers, you see writer’s block is basically an excuse.
People say there are tricks and tips you can use to overcome writer’s block, but I really think that it’s just an excuse for not working hard.
When you sit to write, if you have an article outline in front of you, you’ll find that you can easily write a 1000-word article in 30 minutes or maybe one hour, because you exactly know what to say.
But if you sit and stare at a blank screen, then it’s going to be very hard for things to come out.
The third thing is to have an editing checklist or system.
So when I’m editing, I exactly know what I’m going to do with my first edit. On the second edit, I’m going to put some images. Then I’m going to work on the headline and then I’m going to submit it to the publication. So have some sort of a process so that you’re not starting from scratch every time.
And even in your editing, after you edit, you will start to see certain patterns. For example, you may be using a lot of adverbs, long words or certain phrases in your writing. With an editing checklist in mind, you know the things to look for, which will save you a lot of time.
And just as an overall thing, I would say, plan out your writing process or system in such a way that you’re not editing at the same time that you’re writing.
My current writing system is four days out of the week. Let’s say day 1, 2, 3, 4, I would write. And then day 5 and 6, I would edit, and day 7, I will outline the four articles for the coming week. This is a very simple system that anyone can implement.
What it takes is consistency.
If you can really stick to your system, you will be creating hundreds of articles over the next few months. And when you look back, you’ll have a backlog that you’re really proud of. The system is very simple and the planning process also I’ve kept it very simple because I don’t like complicated things.
Writing is tough as it is. So please don’t make things more complicated for yourself. I’ve seen some writers plan their monthly calendar in advance, but I don’t really do that. I would sit down and plan the four or five articles that I intend to write. And that way I can also keep the doors open for any fresh inspiration that I might receive because I don’t want to box myself in by planning so far ahead.
I think that was a very comprehensive breakdown of how you go with things. Oh, mine is, I would say it’s a bit more erratic in the sense that, the same thing.
I used to have no idea and have a dedicated brainstorming session in the beginning. In the first few months, there would be times when I would be so burned out that one day I would just, be stressed out and then sit down for ideas.
But nowadays I think it’s a mix of observation, reading other stuff, and just random moments of inspiration. I got enough ideas to sustain me.
It’s almost like I ideate only on the weekends since I have a full-time job. On Saturdays and Sundays, I sit and write articles in batches. And then I edit them throughout the week.
No matter how trivial or how stupid an idea is, I jot it down somewhere — either on the notes app on my phone, on a pocketbook, or on Medium itself if I’m on the laptop. It doesn’t even have to be an idea good enough to be fleshed out into an article. It can just be some idea sitting in my draft section. Some of them turn into articles. Some of them don’t turn into articles, but it’s fine. It’s always good to have ideas other than not having them.
Coming to the writing and editing thing, the crucial part is making sure that you write and edit separately. You don’t want to mix those two things up. You write, and then you edit. It’s always going to be that way.
And since writing is a flow-based task, where the high area focuses on the lesser interrupter, the better the actual draft turns out to be.
Write the first draft. It can be totally trash. That doesn’t matter. Editing is where you get really brutal. You want to cut down all of the fluff. Most times I’ll actually cut down 300–400 words off my articles.
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8. Can you share your personal writing systems for Medium, LinkedIn, and Twitter and how you came up with them?
I actually wrote an article about this a few days ago called A Writer’s 5-Step Blueprint To Dominate 5 Platforms: Because your ideas are too precious to use only once. If you’re a creator looking to build a strong personal brand, Where’s my 5-step blueprint to dominate 5 platforms:
- Write unfiltered thoughts in a Tweet
- Pick high-performing Tweets & flesh them out to LinkedIn posts
- Compile 3–4 posts into a Medium article
- Use the article as a script for a YouTube video
- Send a newsletter to your subscribers
I have a few basic content umbrellas. So whenever I get ideas related to them, I post them first on Twitter and then I improvise them and repurpose them for LinkedIn. Then, I modify them for other platforms.
This is the system that’s worked well for me so far. Once the idea is out there on Twitter or LinkedIn, based on the comments from the people, I can iterate it to make it more valuable. This has helped me be consistent on so many different platforms.
The starting part is an idea. Whenever you sit down to write or create something, you already need the idea fleshed out. Then that goal is to take the intangible thought you have in your head and turn it into something tangible.
Where exactly you store an idea doesn’t matter. It just has to be in a place where you can see it and you pick up later on.
Since I since have two newsletters along with Medium, and these are the three things that I’m very active on. First thing is Medium is the main place where I write. The thing with my newsletter Ma(n)ximize is where my brutally honest articles are published.
I don’t have any filters on at all. If I get any area, no matter how trivial or controversial or anything, I’ll just jot it down and it’ll turn into some newsletter issue down the line.
Talking about Medium, or, if I were to start on Twitter on LinkedIn, the idea would be pretty simple. There’s this thing called highlighting on Medium, where readers can highlight sentences here and there. Those make for excellent Tweets.
Since a Tweet is basically a sentence or two, and if see a sentence is highlighted by a lot of readers, it means that it resonated with a lot of people. That means there’s a very high chance that the corresponding Tweet would also be relatable.
That is how I go about writing on Twitter. If you want to write threads, it’s pretty simple. What you could do is let’s say you have an article on Medium, you could summarize it into an article on LinkedIn and then take that LinkedIn article and sort of chop it into or multiple Tweets and make a thread out of it.
This system works really well.
This is my process. I just write on Medium and. I’m intrigued by the process that Anangsha mentioned to use Twitter as a testing ground, but I haven’t done it as of now, though. I’d be very interested to see how it turns out for me perhaps in the future.
But yes, again, Medium is my main platform. It’s sort of my pillar content. And from it, I post out to LinkedIn and Twitter and sometimes to Quora as well, depending upon how much time I have. So I’m not really regular on Quora, but LinkedIn and Twitter are two of my other platforms that I try to be active on.
And so all of that content is coming from Medium. And really once your main pillar is ready, it’s easier to distribute your content to other social media platforms. In the past 18 months, I now have more than 400 articles on Medium. So, I don’t really have to worry about this life trying to create Twitter content. I have a lot of content, uh, that I repurpose.
That’s the benefit of repurposing your content.
And of course, I would say, try to keep your eyes open for what people want on different platforms. Don’t just be blindly using tools like HypeFury to post content and never look at it again, Be active on those platforms, but still realize that you can be smart about it and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every single platform.
9. Is it okay to focus on one platform first and then move onto others?
Or would you recommend distributing the content across all the platforms and simultaneously and leverage all the platforms at once increasing the probability?
Starting with one platform is beneficial because I’m always up for a more focused approach rather than spreading yourself too thin over different platforms.
Let’s say, you’re focusing on LinkedIn, then really focus on LinkedIn. Try to use some analytics applications or softwares analyze what’s going on that, um, you know, on that platform and try to build connections and just.
Invest your time and energy into improving that platform rather than spreading out over different platforms. At the start, you really want to build that momentum and take the advantage of compounding, rather than just making little progress in 10 different platforms.
So I think just go with that.
Once you are big on a certain platform, then you will sort of also realize the principles that are at play in general, if you want to make it big on any platform, are different, but at the same time, they’re also same to some extent.
And the deeper you go into one platform, the more you’ll also understand what your readers want, what clicks with them, and what action you want them to take.
For example, if I would have started to post on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium at the very start of my journey, I’d be a mess. I wouldn’t have been able to write so many articles on Medium that I have now.
But because I was focusing only on Medium and nowhere else, now I understand some of the principles of online writing and some copywriting techniques that I can apply to different platforms.
I totally agree. Like if I started with so many platforms, I would be lost. Focus on one platform maybe for a year or next six months, and then you’ll understand what works and then you can move on to next amazing platform.
Talking about the platform thing I want to reiterate what both of you said. I think six months is an absolute minimum. Writing is a very long game, I would say one year, but most people aren’t that patient. So six months is literally an absolute minimum. You could go five months without a single hit. And then on the last day of your six months, you could get a viral article.
So that’s basically how the game of online works.
10. How can I get more ideas?
There are many ways I get new ideas, I can even sort of bullet them into multiple things, but I’ll just go over, in descending order of how I get my ideas.
1. From what you read
I am very meticulous about who I follow. I only follow the writers whose content I enjoy, or they’re good at one particular thing. Let’s say there’s one writer who’s really good at writing headlines. I would follow him even if I don’t enjoy his writing.
The thing with creatives is most people have this romantic notion of creating. They think that it’s something that has to be a brand new one. They sort of frown upon stealing a template.
When I say copying, it doesn’t mean exactly copying, but if you look at it as a template, you can follow the same, and it’s totally fine to do so. Because no matter, even if you write about the exact same topic since you are a different person with different experiences and different knowledge, you would end up writing something totally different.
2. From your old write-ups
The larger your backlog grows, the easier it gets after. At this point, I’m sitting at over 330 articles on Medium now. And I honestly don’t remember 90% of whatever I’ve written.
I can even go back and pour over my own content to get ideas. Let’s say, it’s been a year or two since you started writing. You can go back to your initial articles. Since you have changed as a person and as a writer over the duration of this writing journey, you can go back and take those exact titles and create a hundred new articles on them.
It’s totally fine to do so since the output would be 100% different.
3. Observing
I look at every incident and think, how do I turn this into something that others can relate to?
Everything is real estate for the writer. Anything and everything that happens in your life or a story that you heard from a friend — all of it can be turned into articles. If not an article, maybe a Tweet. And if not a Tweet, maybe a LinkedIn post.
4. Being consistent with the process
You just cannot get over your writing routine. You can’t be like, “Okay, I’ll blast write for a week. And then I’ll take two weeks off.”
That usually doesn’t work. Ideas need to be generated on the daily to sustain that. So the more ideas you get, the more you’ll usually get — whether you’re in the shower, in a car, or you’re literally sitting on the toilet seat.
In many of my viral articles, I got the ideas while sitting on her toilet seat, not even kidding. The most important part is documenting your idea somewhere.
When you have a backlog of ideas in some journal or anything, you can always go back there and, keep sort of putting out the same stuff and use it for an article.
I recently Tweeted this: “The writer’s urge to turn your entire life into content.”
Every conversation, every book, every movie, can be turned into an article or Tweet. A good write-up comes from your life experiences.
Closing Thoughts
That’s 10 questions from our amazing introductory AMA. I hope you had as much fun reading them as we had while answering them and curating this post.
If you have any suggestions or feedback, please feel free to leave a reply to this email and let us know.
The next post from #TheWriteWay will be in your inboxes this coming Monday, i.e. on 4th April 2022. It will be written by me (Anangsha) and will cover the essence of a great article. I will also include a template and a checklist you can refer to every time you plan to write something new.
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Lots of love and see you next week,
Anangsha
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