Imposter Syndrome on Medium
Does My Content Belong Here?
A few years ago I had a Medium account.
I had the idea of sharing my experience, thoughts and tips in relation to collecting. It is a hobby I was — and still am — very passionate about. I didn’t have a great deal of money so hosting something myself wasn’t really within my reach. I did some research and Medium sounded good, so I joined up.
However, it soon became apparent I wasn’t the ‘right’ sort of person for Medium.
It seemed that the Medium audience, at least at the time, were only interested in two things; promoting their start-up and reading about other successful start-ups. My little collecting articles received one or two views at most, but it was fairly obvious there wasn’t an audience on Medium for them.
It wasn’t all bad though. I sent off the link to an article I’d written to a certain collectors-focused website asking if they’d like me to write for them regularly. To my amazement they said “yes” and I had a wonderful year of writing about collecting and getting paid for it!
Sadly, that site closed down in early 2020. They simply couldn’t get the funding to keep it going. Now, almost a year on, I feel the urge to write about collecting again.
I’ll admit, Medium was not the place I thought I’d end up. My previous experience still left something of a sour taste in my mouth
Still, the more research I did the more Medium made sense. I’m now in a similar situation to before; I have little money due to being one of the many who have lost their jobs during the Covid crisis. Self-hosting is out and I don’t fancy the idea of trying to build an audience from scratch. Someone suggested HubPages, but I really don’t like all those ads plastered all over the place.
I had begun to think I’d just have to wait until I could afford hosting, when I received a reply to a post I’d put on r/MediumApp. It was from a user of Medium who also had a very niche interest they initially felt wouldn’t work here. Except it had. This user, who turned out to be Grin Spickett, gave me some wonderful advice, but it was when I read their article Escape from the Content Black Hole that I became convinced to give Medium another go.
While I still feel a little bit out of place here among all the highly intellectual posts on Medium, I’m going to have a go at building an audience here. All those old articles could find new life (after a bit of up-dating and rejigging, of course). If even one fellow collector reads them and finds them interesting I’ll be happy.
Thus, here begins my new experiment on Medium. I hope people enjoy what I write and at least some find it of value. I’m by no means an expert blogger, but I’ll endeavour to write quality articles that fellow collectors will enjoy.
TTFN (ta-ta for now).
