Our Best (And Worst) Performing Articles Of The Last 6 Months
Since joining Medium and becoming a writer on this platform, I have discovered numerous caveats. The articles we have written for Brightwork have, rather unsurprisingly, rarely performed in the way we have predicted. Frankly, some of what we would consider the best articles we have written have massively underperformed, and others we might not have expected to do so well, have performed significantly better.
Our Top Performer From The Last 6 months
We wrote an article titled, “10 Great Business Ideas for 2022”. Nothing fancy or out of the ordinary. Just another list article, which should have been swallowed up by the sea of other so-called ‘listicles’ on Medium.
But it wasn’t.
In fact, it outperformed every other one of our articles by a metric mile. Just look at the stats for it:
6.4K Views. That might not seem a lot to many people, but it’s a lot more than anything we’ve had thus far. You can’t see it in the above screenshot, but we had 3.5K reads with an average ratio of 56%, which is pretty damn good. See below:
But here’s the kicker — the article itself was terrible! It was written by one of our temporary workers we had hired through the Government Kickstarter Scheme on the back end of the COVID-19 fallout. She was a lovely person and for every ounce of what it’s worth — I’d hire her for other things. But as a writer, I think her talents lie elsewhere, and she knows it.
Grammar mistakes, spelling issues, plagiarism. You name it, it happened in this article and many others during the past 6 months. But it still performed outrageously.
The Worst Performer
We had many terribly performing articles 😂
I won’t list them all, we wrote a lot of articles over the last 6 months. Our strategy was simple — write, write and write. Volume. Our Kickstarters; these weren’t writers by nature or creed, they were people we were helping mould into something that would fit into this industry, because that’s where they mostly wanted to work. So it was quantity over quality a lot of the time. Our worst performing article with any reads (all 1 of them) was titled, “Climate Action: Why Country Is Winning The Race To Zero?”. I thought, “This is going to be a sure winner.”…
The article, like many others, was a flop. It didn’t take my completely by surprise, though. As I’d read many articles prior to this project, talking about how writing for yourself rather than other people is the way to go. Yes, you’ll certainly get less views, people may not even read your content at all or you may get a single reader, much like my most recent article on How To Have a Good Bad Day.
But that’s something to think about isn’t it? If I write an article with real value. Lifechanging advice and perspective, it may not reach many people, but if it reaches one single person and helps them in some way, surely that’s what it’s about? Sure, you could write 100 ‘listicle’ articles and get hundreds of thousands of views, but who does that really help?
What sort of content do you write? Do you write about the things you want to write about, regardless of views or reads? Or do you cater to the Medium audience? Let us know!
