Cover Illustration licensed from VectorStock.com (adapted)

All the best writing lessons you could wish for in a single post

Last month, I decided to finally take my writing seriously. This may sound ridiculous to some since, at the time of writing this, I have written over 600 articles and over 5 million views on my articles. But the truth is, I had never taken writing seriously.

I had been writing for one hour daily for close to three years now, but for me, it was all a game. I rarely tried to understand how everything worked. I never cared if my articles succeeded or not. Two years ago, I stopped bothering to look at my stats. I just wrote, plain and simple.

Finally, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to call myself a writer. But in order to do that, I have to earn it. I have to take it seriously and work on my craft.

So, in an effort to grow, I started collecting data to analyze patterns of things that work. I could have kept this all to myself, but frankly, I think it’s knowledge worth sharing.

Data Collection Process

*For the results and observations, you can skip this section.

Step 1. Finding the top tags

The first step was to figure out which tags are the most popular. I picked those with over 60K uses. Here are the most popular all-time tags:

I have omitted News and Politics mainly because of one major outlier, umair haque. His data skewed everything. These tags were also used by the popular articles in the list:

The number on the right indicates how many of the 721 popular articles used the tags. (No clue why “happiness” is there twice)

If you want to know how many times a tag was used, you can do that from the tags manager when pressing on ... and then Change tags in the top-right corner of the screen when editing a story. It looks like this:

In this example, “Life” was used 462K times. It’s one of the top tags.

Step 2. Finding the top writers for those tags

For each of the identified tags, I’ve picked the top 10 or so writers. Here’s an example for Life: https://medium.com/tag/life/top-writers. The list is in order of most popular to least popular. It only shows the top 50 for the tag.

Here’s a screenshot of the top 5 writers in the Life tag for today:

These change quite frequently, so check back once in a while to see who’s top.

Step 3. Find these writers’ top articles

Since the only public data we have available is the number of claps, I had to choose that as the main indicator of popularity. It’s a decent metric to go by but isn’t without flaws. Going over them is beyond the point of this article.

Now, finding the best articles from writers might seem tedious for many, but there’s a secret trick: you can easily figure out a writer’s top articles using a link like this one:

https://medium.com/search?q=danny%20forest

These are my most popular articles, ordered in descending order of views. Notice the q=<name> at the end of the url? That’s the key. Change that for any writer you want to look up. Here are a few more examples:

Now that I knew how to get the best articles, I had to decide on a cutoff point that’s remarkable. I settled for 7,000 claps. I found that many writers could get below 7,000 claps, but above were the outlier pieces.

The resulting list

For your own pleasure, check out the list of 721 hugely popular articles. The last entry was entered on September 10th. It’s likely that there are more articles to add now.

The resulting writers

The list contains articles from the following incredible writers (sorted by the number of popular articles descending:

Interesting Observations

*Going forward, “the articles” will refer to the list of 721 hugely popular articles.

Headline

Popular words included in the popular articles:

Not, stop, save you, don’t do, saying little, quiet, shy, habits, routine, super (power), say yes, say no, anxiety, fear, change, life, underrated, give up.

Popular concepts:

Tiny thing leading to huge results
Things to stop doing
“You are not…”
Routines
Habits
Mental health issues (anxiety, overthinking, lack of focus, etc.)
Changing your life
Things that are bulletproof / making it impossible to…
Quotes (sometimes)
Unstoppability

Other:

Subtitles don’t seem necessary. About 75 percent of the articles have a subtitle.
Headline length ranges greatly. Note, however, that the top 10 articles have fewer than 10 words.
The most popular starting word is “how” (17 percent).
The second-most popular starting “word” is a number.
41 percent of the top articles in 2020 were listicles.
The biggest list was 31 items.
The average listicle contains 7–8 items.
If we look at the top 20 articles only, the average listicle contains 4–5 items.

Featured Image

Illustrations work.
Photos of women beat photos of men (about 2% of the articles feature a man).
Photos of people from the side or the back work better than photos from the front.
Photos of famous people sometimes work (Elon Musk or Bill Gates in particular).
Thinking poses seem to work.
Sunsets and sunrises seem to work.

Publications

Top 5 publications of 2020: Mind Cafe, Personal Growth, Better Marketing, The Ascent, and P.S. I Love You.

Overall, 10.6 percent of the top articles were self-published (and only 2.4 percent in 2020).
Some writers have success writing for their own publications: Darius Foroux in The Blog of Darius Foroux, Thomas Oppong in Kaizen Habits, Shannon Ashley in Honestly Yours, and Danny Forest in SkillUp Ed.

Article length

Number of popular articles with the displayed length in minutes

Over 80% are less than 10-min reads.

Only 7 articles were longer than 20 minutes; 5 by Benjamin Hardy, 1 by Danny Forest, and 1 by Nicolas Cole.
41 articles were fewer than 4 minutes (mostly those in Forge).
138 articles were 5 minutes → Most popular.
107 articles were 4 minutes → Second most popular.
92 articles were 6 minutes.
The very top articles are all ≥ 5 minutes, with an average of 7 minutes (rounded).

Curation

All the articles were curated, with the exception of articles published before curation was a thing.

Top writer status

The average number of “top writer tags” from writers in the list is 5.
The popularity of the tag doesn’t seem to matter. Jessica Wildfire is top in the following semi-popular tags: Humor, Books, Relationships, Culture, Satire.

Tags/Topics

Top 5 tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Life, Productivity, Personal Development. (Note that these are not the most popular tags, just the most used ones in the top articles)

Following

With 2 exceptions, all the writers on the list have over 10K followers.

Claps

165 articles have 10K claps or less (about 23 percent of the list).
132 of the articles in the list have over 20K claps.
53 of the articles in the list have over 30K claps.
24 of the articles in the list have over 50K claps.
1 article on the list has more than 100k claps (published in 2016).

Published Date

Day of the week popular articles were published on

151 articles in the list have been published in 2020 (last updated on September 2020, so the year isn’t finished).

169 articles in the list have been published in 2019.
66 articles have been published in 2018.
22 articles have been published in 2017.
Articles are getting more popular year over year.

Publishing frequency

*Based on data collected from August-September 2020

Articles per month. Ordered descending.

Tim Denning: 66
Matt Lillywhite: 33
Sean Kernan: 28
David O.: 28
Ayodeji Awosika: 24
Nicolas Cole: 24
Jessica Wildfire: 21
Todd Brison: 20
Shannon Ashley: 20
Shaunta Grimes: 18
Niklas Göke: 17
Danny Forest:15
Thomas Oppong: 16
Michael Thompson: 12
Sinem Günel: 12
Amardeep Parmar: 11
Barry Davret: 10
Nick Wignall: 8
Benjamin Hardy: 7
Darius Foroux: 4
Sira M.: 2

Publishing quantity

The average number of articles published for the writers on the list is 440.
To get a single popular article, the top writers had to publish an average of 28 articles.
The highest ratio of popular articles (by far) is 23.73 percent, by Nick Wignall.

All the Lessons

The more you publish, the higher your chances of getting a “hit”

With a few exceptions, all top writers in the list publish very frequently. One thing to note also is that they also publish quality articles. So, you need both quantity and quality.

Also, if the average number of articles it takes for these top writers to get a “hit” is 28, that means less “renown” writers need more. Remember, all the top writers on the list had over 10,000 followers (with two exceptions).

Publications matter, but here’s something data doesn’t tell you

Publishing in larger publications helps with visibility. However, you should always aim to publish in publications that are a good fit for your stories.

And one thing the data doesn’t show but I’ve confirmed with publication owners: writers make or break a publication. The top 5 publications are on top because of their top writers who keep publishing hit articles. It doesn’t mean that you’ll have the same success in those publications.

Mid-week is best to publish

In 2020, Wednesday is the day that led to the most hits. The theory is that it takes a few days for the piece to pick up for the weekend, where the claps are the highest (on Saturday).

Having a large following does help

Having a hit article is easier when you already have a following, as shown in the data. It doesn’t mean you can’t get a viral article without followers, it just means it’s harder.

Hit articles matter

This is potentially the most important lesson of the article: your viral articles will always be your main driver of revenues. Every single one of the writers on the list has articles that flop all the time. Their stats remain high as they keep publishing articles that become popular.

A huge shift is happening to headlines

Prior to 2020, clickbait worked. The tides have turned in 2020. Novel/creative titles are picking up the slack.

Things to avoid are more popular than things to do

Articles about things to avoid are more popular than things you should do. People would rather avoid mistakes than to do new things.

Habits and routines remain strong in 2020

Not much to say here, but if you have personal stories of habits and routines, they might be helpful to others and get read more.

Listicles still rock the charts

Readers still love listicles. They’re easily digestible and tend to be more “to the point”.

Spending time finding the right cover photo helps

There are types of photos that work better. Readers love to see other humans, so photos of people tend to perform best. Illustrations are getting more popular in 2020. Statistically, photos of women are more popular.

Conclusion

Phew, that’s a lot of data to look at! Hopefully, you learned a few things and it gives you some sense of direction as to how you should proceed with your stories going forward.

You can do this!

— Danny