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Write differently
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Last month I posted two articles here on Medium. One was a reflective self-help piece that I spent a few hours on. The other is a super short piece I bashed out in about twenty minutes and illustrated with a stock photo of Spiderman reading, because why not.
Guess which one has performed better for me so far?
If you guessed Spiderman, then bingo — you got it!
But if you thought my take-away from the was going to be “write quick and simple articles” you’re very wrong. I’ve had one article here go viral (albeit in a very small niche community) and that is also my longest article to date. My highest earning article, however, is of average-to-long length and did take me a fair while to get right.
So that means that I’m telling you to write longer pieces, right?
Wrong again!
The thing I’ve learned is that it’s helpful to not get locked into a single way of writing. Diversify a little bit. Spicing up the length is the simplest way to do this, but you can change your tone, your angle, even your topic.
Yes, your audience will have certain expectations of you and it is silly to stray too far from that core content. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t at least play around with length, if nothing else. If…