No, it’s not Medium’s fault
When you analyze what articles worked in November, you see that 50% of the top 20 articles were about politics. That’s right, 10 out of 20 were about the USA’s presidential elections.
There’s a really simple lesson here: to get a top-performing article, you have to write about what people are currently reading.
Did you write about politics last month? No? Well, if you wanted to succeed, that’s what you should have done. Failing that, you should have changed your name to Genius Turner and written about billionaires in Entrepreneur’s Handbook.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a table of the top 20 articles from November 2020:
Source: Author, based on public data on Medium.com
If you’ve seen your stats go down in the recent past, there’s a good chance it’s not because you’re not as good or the Medium algorithm doesn’t like you, it’s simply a matter of “when”.
Near the end of October and throughout November, the news was filled with everything elections-related. It’s no surprise then that what readers were interested in reading was also elections-related.
As for the billionaire trend, it’s been massively more popular in the months following the announcement of the pandemic as people started losing their jobs or closing their businesses down. Until the job economy picks up again, and even likely long after, it will remain a popular topic.
Now, let’s contrast the above with the top 25 articles from August 2020:
Source: Author, based on public data on Medium.com
There’s a bunch about money and another bunch about self-help. If you were writing about self-help in August, you were writing about what people were reading. If that didn’t work in November, it’s not Medium’s fault, it’s the reader’s fault.
So, what’s going to be popular in December? Since it’s still very early in the month, I won’t share data about the current popular articles as they’re likely not going to make it in the top 25 by the end of the month anyway. My prediction is that these topics have a good chance of success:
Stories about Christmas
Stories about year-end reviews
Stories about 2021
Stories about how to make 2021 better
Stories about vaccines (especially controversial ones)
Stories about Joe Biden and Donald Trump (yes, still)
Successful writers adapt their writing based on current trends. Of course, if the trend isn’t something you’re familiar with, you might have a harder time.
After analyzing data for most of 2020, there isn’t one writer that’s consistently at the top because there isn’t a writer who is skilled enough to write about the popular topics of the time all the time. Plus, a trend isn’t always easy to identify at the moment, so by the time you notice that something is a trend, it’s likely too late.
I’ve been writing on the platform for three years now and I’ve seen my fair share of ups and downs. It’s simple: I kept writing what I wanted to write about. During some months, that aligned with what readers wanted to read. Other months, not so much. When you’re in it for the long game, you don’t check your performance monthly, you check it over a longer period.
Like many people on the platform, November tanked for me. Boohoo. I knew full well that it would. I knew what I had to do, I just didn’t want to do it. I intentionally sat the trend. I don’t have much to add about American politics (I’m Canadian) and I don’t have much to say about billionaires.
If you write about self-help, there’s a chance it may pick up near the end of December. If not, follow my friend George J. Ziogas’s advice from one of our Slack conversations:
“Chin up, crank the volume up on the metal tunes, and hit the weights/gym like a beast — that’s my December plan :)”
Self-help is not going away. If you wrote about self-help in the past, you can simply continue to do so and some months will be better than others. You can choose to ride a trend or sit it out. Most successful writers I know don’t even care and just keep writing no matter what. They’re in it for the long game. That’s a winning strategy.