How I reached 1000 followers on my blog after a few months?
I started in November last year writing on Medium because I got laid off from a tech company. Since then, I never stopped writing here and I’m not expecting to stop soon.
I started in November last year writing on Medium because I got laid off from a tech company. Since then, I never stopped writing here and I’m not expecting to stop soon. However, not always easy and it’s still not easy, but I’m enjoying sharing my ideas here with my current and new followers. Now, I have reached precisely 999 followers and I will share with you my honest thoughts about what I’ve learned during this journey as a writer and my advice for new writers here on Medium.
By the way, I’m not a professional writer and I don’t have a long experience of writing (actually, my main tongue is not English), but there are some small tips that you should follow and I definitely can ensure you that it works to help you to grow your followers on Medium.
1. What the readers of Medium are looking for?
First of all, you should try to understand what the Medium users are looking for when they come to Medium? They are looking for authenticity. The problem with Medium is that the platform pays for writers just based on the reading time of subscribed members, and so, this platform is getting full of trash. Really, if you search something like “How to easily make money online”, you will find a bunch of repetitive articles, with a lot of text but with zero value, because those articles just show generic content such as “Write a blog… Start an e-commerce business… Offer your services on Fiverr…”. Well, those are actually ideas, but they don’t add absolutely anything to your knowledge.
What the readers are looking for are stories, experiences, and real results about the writers. And actually, is getting harder and harder to find this kind of real content (actually Medium should start to restrict this kind of generic content to only keep authentic content, which is just an idea Medium… Wink, wink…), there are a lot of writers they are completely bots, they just set a catchy title and then a completely useless content with generic ideas.
If you look at my previous articles, you will find just authentic stories, about my layoff from a Tech Company, or about how I’m starting small businesses, or about my failures and results of those projects. I just write unique content, content that ChatGPT will not be able to create, because ChatGPT don’t have a human experience, and the readers of Medium are looking for real stories where they could learn or get inspired by those stories.
So, to sum up, stop writing generic and useless content, I know it’s easier, but that is not writing. Start writing your stories, your real stories. Trust me, we always have stories to tell.
2. Stop promoting your posts externally to the Medium platform
In the beginning, when I started this blog, I was trying to promote my articles in every place (Reddit, Hackernews, etc…), to get more views faster. What I learned with that strategy is just a waste of time and actually could impact negatively your content in the Medium ecosystem (that is what matters). The reasons are simple:
Medium just pay you for views that come from subscribed members;
If you promote externally your articles, some users can just open them to check out what you just tried to share, and they close the window immediately. They are not Medium users, and you don’t even know if they are people that enjoy reading, so, if they leave to earlier that will impact negatively in your Read ratio;
So, basically, I just stopped promoting my articles. I write them, I publish them, and the only place I promote those articles is on my Twitter account and in my Substack blog (I replicate all my posts on Substack).
3. Have some consistency in publishing new posts
In the beginning, I was writing every single day, but I could just do that for two weeks more or less. I started to feel tired and it was getting harder to think about new topics or stories to write about. So, I realized that if I try to keep writing at that pace, I will probably get tired really soon and then maybe stop writing at all.
This is like going to the gym, at the beginning you are too much ambitious and you think “now on I will go every day to the gym”, then you start to fail in your commitment, you missed one day, two days, and then you just lost your commitment because you started to fail regularly.
So, it’s better to be realistic and set some realistic goals. I realized that I will not be able to write every day, but I knew that the day that I was more productive in writing was on Monday morning. So I decided that I will just write every Monday, no matter what and even if I’m on holidays. Because writing once a week, is actually enjoy full and I don’t feel like I’m working when I’m writing, but if I had to do it every single day, I will not resist for a long time.
Having this consistency, not only helps you to keep writing new articles and getting new article ideas in advance, but also helps the Medium algorithm to keep promoting your articles.
4. Keep writing only for a niche and nothing else
I’m a person that is interested in many different topics, such as “solopreneurship”, “businesses”, “remote working”, “financial market”, “tech teams management”, “Web development”, “motivational and inspiring speech”, etc… Like all of you, I have many interests and I enjoy writing about many different topics, and I actually did it at the beginning, but that was a mistake.
My current niche is people that want to get inspired on starting their own businesses as a solopreneur and are looking for others' experiences, and I should keep focusing on that topic (that actually, is the topic I prefer to talk about). There were a few articles that I wrote about managing a team or working remotely, but was completely out of my target and so the views were really low as well. If my target is to inspire solopreneurs, I should keep writing for that target and if I want to talk about other topics, then is better to start a new Medium blog account. So, choose a topic that you enjoy writing about and keep writing for that target and nothing else, your followers are expecting that type of content.
So, those are my pieces of advice if you are starting a new Medium blog. Let me know what you think and if you also have some advice, feel free to share those with me, I will appreciate it (since I’m still learning how to get better here).
PS: By the way, when I finished this article I just received the notification that I reached 1k followers :)
Have a nice week,
Follow me on: Twitter, Substack, IndieHackers, and Medium
True, authenticity is scarce on Medium.