Hi,

you're reading Medium Mondays. In this newsletter, I shared with you the in-depth lessons I learn by writing on Medium, and constantly talking with writers, editors and Boost nominators.

This week, a behind the scenes on one of Medium's top authors: Neeramitra Reddy.

Enjoy!

Neeramitra Reddy has been very successful Medium author for a long time. His articles are widely read. He received 25 boosts. As an editor of the Medium publication In Fitness and In Health, he has nominated more than a hundred articles that then were accepted for the Boost.

He knows a thing or two about what works on Medium.

If you don’t know it yet, the Boost is Medium’s name for human curation. It is your best chance to get good views and earnings on Medium.

The traits of a Boost-worthy article vary depending on its genre. Neeramitra mainly writes guides and tutorials, like me. So I studied him to reverese-engineer his recipe for success.

Recently, he also gave me recommendations on a couple of my articles before nominating them. So, I got a behind the scenes look on how he works to get Boosted.

Let me share with you what I learned, so that you, too can get more views and earnings.

By the way, the last article we worked on has just been Boosted. It’s here.

It all starts before even thinking about the article

Most of Neeramitra's Boosted articles are about his personal experiments and experiences. Look at these ones, for example:

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They remind me of an episode of the How I Write podcast, with Tim Ferriss as a guest. He told the interviewer that to write interesting articles, you must first do interesting things.

It couldn't be more accurate. This is also what unites almost all of my Boosted stories.

Neeramitra is constrantly and genuinely striving to maximize his life. Readers love to vicariously learn through his experiences.

A glass house

The best pairing for the experimentation habit is a documentation habit. I have to scold myself about this. In the last 10-15 years I learned, tested and tweaked dozens of habits and techniques in areas such as self-improvement, productivity, parenting, and business. I internalized the lessons, but failed to extensively document my journey.

Neeramitra, instead, not only keeps track of his progress. He also collects pictures of himself, his tools, his environment, and so on. This way he can make his articles more personal and credible.

Extreme detail

For years, the best reading length for a Medium articles has been around six minutes. However, many of Neeramitra's guides go well beyond that, even to around fifteen minutes.

Writing such a long article is much more challenging. Complexity increases exponentially because the different parts of the article interact with each other.

The audience likes systematic and exptremely deep articles. But this is a risky approach. I too have written very long guides, and they have been appreciated even when they did not receive a Boost. But without a Boost, the earnings are limited.

Be a teacher

Neeramitra's guides are not only long. They are also written like self-contained lessons. They provide:

• steps,
• examples,
• mistakes to avoid,
• both the easy and advanced approach,
• summaries.

These articles stand out from 90% of what you can find online. Many websites provide just the bare minimum to hook your interest and rank on Google, but they are not genuinely useful.

Pepper your writing

Neeramitra told me that nominators, curators, and readers love some additions to your articles like: personal observations, links to research studies or reputable sources, personal photos and original illustrations.

As I mentioned, I have worked with Neeramitra on some articles, and this approach is very laborintensive. It significantly increases the risk. Instead of spending three hours on a 6-minute article, you spend 10, 20 hours, on a super in-depth mega-guide.

Unfortunately, the Boost is not predictable, and so you risk doing all this work and still not receiving it. However, it is worth trying for a while and then assess the ROI over the long-term.

I hope you found this helpful. If you need help growing on Medium, for a limited time I'm providing free 30-minute calls to go over your strategy. Click here to book yours.

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See you soon!

Alberto