The best way to dilute your perceived brand authority as a writer is commoditizing your work. AI is tempting everyone writing on Medium to enter the quantity trap. You see some author publishing every day and feel like you’re being left out.
You start thinking maybe you should start publishing more. Please don’t.
I will tell you why
You can never compete in the quantity game. That is turning your work into low-priced fast-moving consumer goods. That’s the worst thing you can do to your brand. Writers ought to have some self-respect.
You can only compete on:
Value and proposition.
Having soul in the game.
Being relevant and relatable.
Like I said in this piece, we are past the time of sharing five tips to do this or five tips not to do that. With AI in the mix, it is no longer about what is posted, But who posted it.
You should worry more about what the writing reflects about you than a 30-article-per-month goal.
Growth doesn’t even work that way. Frequency is one thing. Quality and TIME are other crucial factors. Fast writing your way to success is as rare as a green dog. Resist the urge to break your great idea into three fluff-filled pieces.
Oh, is it the Medium money?
I was initially sad that the Medium Partner program does not apply in my country. But then I realized it was a blessing in disguise. It gives me a reason to focus on why I am here rather than looking at what numbers each post gets. Any platform that introduces a payment model, its users largely become commodities. Few earn actual money. The masses forage on pennies.
If your goal is solely to get Medium money, I understand the pressure to publish more. You write one piece and it flops. You think if I write another it will help. Before you realize it, you have 100 articles on your profile that even you, the author, won’t spend 40 seconds reading. People smell it when you’re writing just for the views.
Joined Medium in 2018 then abandoned it. But this piece I wrote, not proud of it now, gets 250 reads per month. Try having a few pieces like this. Not 100 articles that get 9 reads per month and stop getting any in the future.
Let’s talk business
There are better ways to make money online. Any earning model tied to your activity within a particular platform is unsustainable and not to be relied upon. Unles you’re Mr. Beast, which you are not.
Here is the question; what is your main business? That main business should be your digital home and you use these platforms you have little control over as DISTRIBUTION channels. Whether it is LinkedIn, Medium, or X — they’re at best distribution channels.
Since I write experience-based insights, here is an example; I have a marketing agency that also provides hosting and web design services. I also have an eBook.
I spend ZERO on marketing. No cold DMs, no networking events. My audience of 32,000+ followers on LinkedIn is where I get most of the qualified leads. The combined monthly income is not even close to 10x what most writers earn here per month.
It takes the pressure of speed off if you are not beholden to a platform’s built-in way of earning. I am basically talking about diversification.
The value of trust is raising
The marketplace of ideas has become chaotic. But thanks to one thing. People now come online with an understanding that everyone can easily come up with something. And they also know that the invisible hand of AI is becoming harder to spot. So who did the posting matters more than what was posted. Reputation and provenance will prevail.
Take a look at your articles and ask yourself, “What kind of reputation am I building here?” And when the pressure to publish more comes, ask yourself “To what end?”
I learned very early in my writing journey that the only thoughts I have control over what people think of them are those I haven’t shared yet.
In this edition of Social Rhetoric, we are going to crush your fears. That concern of what people will think of your post. The one that made you leave so many thoughts unpublished. Thoughts that would have made an echo in someone’s life.
Your fears are misplaced. Whenever you ask ‘What will people think of my post’ you ask the wrong question. There is no “people.” Let me explain:
Like I said in this article, when you are writing a thought, or idea (post), you are not writing one post. You are writing 100s of posts.
That’s because many people are going to read and understand it differently. It is going to find people in a different state of mind or environment that may affect their judgment. How can you control that? Should you care?
Let’s say that you care. This means you craft something that succeeds to get everyone to agree with what you have said. Well, then you should not have said it. You just said something so basic that has been said over and over. You held back your thoughts, you were not communicating, you were simply sharing information.
Even when two or three people leave negative comments, it is two out of how many received the message –200? Strangely, we tend to be bothered by the small number of negative comments than the majority of positive ones.
Online discourse is about sharing insights that can be accrued to your name. If it is unique and valuable, society rewards you. If it is bad, you bear the brunt of criticism. The last time I checked, people were still forgiving.
The only thought you have control over what people think of it is the one you have not shared yet. Once you click publish, it is no longer in your control and in most cases not your responsibility what people make of it.
Promise yourself this
If you discover that you have a voice that needs an outlet, then give that voice an outlet. Which is to say post online. If you discover that you have a way of presenting things in a way that people get interested to listen, then it is irresponsible not to do so.
Also what if you are not writing to present-day humans? People who lived 100 years ago are speaking to us through their writings. What if you’re speaking to someone in the future -should you care what present humans think of it?
When I started reading philosophy, I came across Hannah Arendt, a historian and political philosopher whose work has been resoundingly successful at provoking thought and discussion.
Reflecting on her work towards the end of her life, she said this:
“Each time you write something and you send it out into the world and it becomes public, obviously everybody is free to do with it what he pleases, and this is as it should be. I do not have any quarrel with this. You should not try to hold your hand now on whatever may happen to what you have been thinking for yourself. You should rather try to learn from what other people do with it.”
If you have an unclear definition of who you are talking to, your message is likely to appeal to no one. If you are a business, you end up talking about your company and product features.
Think of these messages you often see on websites and social media posts:
“We are the best service provider”
“Our service”
“Our mission, vision, about us, our team..”
“We are excited to..”
People who think that they are communicating with an audience usually write things like that.
But the thing is there is no audience. You only speak to one person. If there are 200 people, you are not talking to 200 people. You are talking to 200 individuals.
An audience of people does not receive and process your message in unison. Each person receives and processes the message individually in his or her mind.
An individual is likely to think “I am here listening to Jordan Petterson”. Not “We are here listening to Jordan Petterson”.
I think Swahili preachers understand this. If you listen from a distance, you may think the pastor is talking to one person in that church. Then you get closer and find over 100 people are listening to Mwamposa (a Swahili preacher in Tanzania).
An effective message is one tailored to a single person. This is why in content marketing strategy we have audience personas.
A persona is that one individual representing the customers you target. So you create this fictional person, you give them a name, demographic information, lifestyle, income, etc.
That is where you can craft a message every individual who identifies with that persona will find it is about him or her.
A message generalized to a faceless mass of people does not land well. Try to watch people who fall asleep during speeches. Mostly it is because the speaker is delivering a prefabricated message without caring about who is in the audience. The same goes for social media posts that don’t generate engagement.
Talking to your audience of one
Let us say you talk about how youths can leverage digital to find alternative career paths and escape endemic unemployment. And you probably have a friend (her name is *Minza) or know someone who is struggling with unemployment and doesn’t know where to start.
Now your message will be more impactful if you deliver it as if talking to Minza. Not because you know there are other unemployed youths out there. Others will feel like you are talking to them only if you talk to Minza whose challenges you know well and care to help.
Address yourself as an audience
Nobody knows you as you do. And guess what, there are things bothering you that others find bothering too. Opinions that others may find interesting. But you don’t know who these “others” may be.
So when in doubt, make yourself your own target audience. Project yourself out there and write to yourself. I will give you an example:
In this LinkedIn post, (sorry it is in Swahili) I say “If you come from a low-income country or a poor family, make sure you earn in dollars on the internet”. This is me telling me. Because I live in a low-income country and my family has struggled with not having many resources for a long time. (See similar post in English)
So the others who liked commented and shared just happened to relate to the message.
Also in this post, I talk about the challenges one goes through to register a business entity in Tanzania. This is something I have experienced while registering Tanzlite Digital and I found them absurd. Turns out I am not the only one.
NOTE that in all those posts I don’t use the personal pronoun “I”. It is like I am telling you if you happen to hear an echo in your own experience.
So that’s it. To be compelling, to deliver clarity and conviction, master the art of talking to an audience of one.
The best moment in my marketing career was an embarrassment. In 2021, I had a client I was helping with LinkedIn. She was a foreigner, an expat. Our first meeting was at Serena Hotel where we discussed the project, expectations, and deliverables.
On our second meeting, the next week, she came with her husband. And it was he who humbled my perceived expertise in marketing. He told me he viewed my LinkedIn profile and was impressed.
Then he tried to engage me in a conversation that ranged from human behavior (psychology), Lehman Brothers (banking and economics), Rory Sutherland, a TV show called Mad Men (advertising), and other topics I barely kept up with.
To his surprise, it turned out I hadn’t heard about Rory Sutherland or watched the Mad Men show -which is kind of like you claim to be a Christian but you haven’t heard of Moses or read Paul’s letter to Corinthians.
He expected me to have the sophistication of someone who is well-read and has a complex sense of perception. Or at least live up to the impression he made of me from LinkedIn.
I learned a precious lesson that day. A lesson I later discovered the masters of delivery such as comedians know very well.
How comedians deliver battle-tested jokes that land
In The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel uses the example of comedians to describe the concept of tail events in investment. He says:
No comedic genius is smart enough to preemptively know what jokes will land well. Every big comedian tests their material in small clubs before using it in big venues.
Chris Rock was once asked if he missed small clubs. He responded:
“When I start a tour, it’s not like I start out in arenas. Before this last tour I performed in this place in New Brunswick called the Stress Factory. I did about 40 or 50 shows getting ready for the tour.”
One newspaper profiled these small-club sessions. It described Rock thumbing through pages of notes and fumbling with material. “I’m going to have to cut some of these jokes,” he says mid-skit.
Practice, practice, practice
Enviably articulate people were not born that way. They take a crazy amount of preparation before they deliver their message to us.
The Dave Chappelle you see on YouTube is hilarious and flawless. But the Dave Chapelle that practices in smaller clubs, or in his room is just OK.
In his words, Neil DeGrasse Tyson ( a master of delivery himself) said on Masterclass that 90% of the words that come out of his mouth publicly —he has written them before. They existed in written form first, which allowed him to organize his thoughts before someone judged him in that instant.
“You need to be 10x prepared in order to make it look like you did not need to prepare at all. To make it look like you just walked in and start flowing”
The stakes are high when it comes to presenting before an audience. It doesn’t matter whether you are a priest, comedian, a general in the army, CEO, or a school teacher. The rules for impactful delivery still apply.
Practice, practice, practice.
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Valuable content has already been shared. Just Google or ask an AI and you will get it all.
“But I have picked a niche” you may argue. Yes, but so do 1000 others. Do you think they are not sharing valuable content like you do?
Also, people know a lot more than you think. So simply sharing valuable information does not work. Your content may be welcome but it rarely helps you achieve what you want. Which is building a name.
What is valuable content anyway?
Valuable content is anything you share that others, the audience you talk to, may find useful.
A quotation from Nelson Mandela or Tony Robbins is valuable information. But can you expect to gain anything from sharing that?
The gurus will tell you that all it takes to build a name is to share valuable content. But what they don’t tell you is that valuable content in itself may not help you build a personal brand. Because, like I said, valuable information is all over the internet.
You have to share valuable content that can be accrued to your name. So you can reap the benefit of recognition and ultimately make money out of it.
A good test to whether your insights can be accrued to you is this; if we remove your name and give the content to someone else to share, will people notice something is off?
If somebody else can own your content and nothing happens, then you two have been merely sharing valuable information.
Look at people who share startup trends or motivation, they amass engagement but their brand authority remains weak. They struggle to monetize their efforts. Why? They simply share valuable information that is all over there.
Bring a different perspective
People know a lot more than you think. But you may gain their attention by helping them see what they already know from a different perspective. Be someone who sees what everyone is seeing but thinks what everybody isn’t.
It is not enough to share valuable information. You have to be effective. You want to leave an impression in someone’s mind, not a simple agreement because you said something obvious.
Try costly signalling
Anything a person says or does that involves cost tends to inspire trust. For example, humor is a very expensive skill. If you can make people laugh while sharing something, you easily stand out. Can you share valuable content in a humorous way?
Another example of costly signaling is being a contrarian. Share unpopular opinions on what is known to be the case. Just like what I’m trying to do here. I am challenging the popular advice of “share valuable content.”
In this post, I tried to signal that I am an observant person. I tried to explain a pattern I observed at the gym and how it manifests in other life instances from business to politics and scammers.
Stand out with a personal experience
We recently wrote an article at my agency that resonated with many business owners. What is unique about the article is that it is not generic best practices or how to grow a business online. It is packed with experience-based, not Googable tips. Nobody can own what you personally experienced. So try to weave personal experience into the known valuable information you share.
No random person from the internet can claim to have been here and share the experience of what was being discussed. Only me, because it is my experience.
Do not share valuable content
Be opinionated, connect the dots, and share experience-driven insights. Writing for authority has moved from sharing the general “5 ways to do it, or three ways not to do it”, hacks and steal this or that. We are now into opinionated and experience-driven posts. Things that nobody can just take and make their own.
