The Secrets to How I Gained 3,000 Followers in Under 2 Months
Taking a nap can change your whole perspective on life.
Earlier this afternoon I was feeling wiped and decided to lay down for about an hour.
What I gleefully knew at that moment was that when I woke up, I would have crossed the threshold of 3,000 followers on my account.
As I started to close my eyes, my account stood at 2,998 followers. Just 2 more and I would hit the magic number.
Sure enough, when my alarm startled me awake an hour later, I had not only crossed the threshold, but I stood at 3,004 followers and now have 3,008 at the time of this writing.
They just keep flooding in due to a variety of strategies that I have laid out to help ensure that this is the case.
I told Lily that I wanted the go-ahead to share a little about those secrets with you today, and she winked at me (as seen in the photo), so I think its okay to move forward.
Before we get into it, you don’t want to miss useful content like this do you?
Be the first to know when I drop my latest piece by subscribing to receive e-mails every time I do.
It’s completely FREE and gets you the content you crave right away. Just click the link here:
Almost All of the Growth Has Come Since January 1st
2024 has been great to me in a number of ways, not the least of which is the fact that my follower growth has exploded.
Longtime followers will know that I sat down to truly start to take my journey on Medium seriously on December 22, 2023.
I felt like it was time to give this platform a try again after having a long abandoned account simply festering away not doing anything.
I am certainly glad that I did because I have not only found success in growing my audience and earnings but also in fostering real-world friendships.
You see, that’s the thing about the audience that I have built on Medium. I don’t just view them as numbers on a spreadsheet.
Nope!
The first thing that I try to do when connecting with others is get some sense of who they are as a person.
How do you do this?
By actually READING their stories and getting a grasp on what they like to write and think about.
You aren’t doing so merely to flatter them or pretend like you care about what they have to say.
Rather, you do so to figure out if there is any hope of forming a true understanding of them as a person and relating to them on a deeper level.
Keep in mind that this won’t work out just perfectly with everyone on the platform.
There are times when you will just want to take a pass on a potential follow.
After all, there is no sense in cluttering up your feed with accounts that you don’t truly have an interest in following.
Typing Speed Matters
Click, click, click, how fast are you able to spill the words out onto the digital page?
This is a topic that I want to cover in more depth in a later post, but I thought it was worth mentioning here.
Your typing speed matters, a lot.
You need to be capable of churning out the comments at a fairly rapid clip.
Yes, you want those comments to be thoughtful and relevant, don’t get me wrong, but you also need to have the ability to type those comments quickly so that you can get a fair amount done in a given day.
You can test your typing speed at a variety of different free online typing test websites.
That will give you a baseline for where you are now.
Then, there are plenty of fun typing speed games that you can challenge yourself to so you can work on upping your typing speed.
Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to improving your typing speed.
You just have to keep writing and writing and writing to see it increase over time.
Trust me, it will happen.
I have 14 years of freelance writing experience come next month, so I have churned out a lot of content.
When I first started writing though, my typing speed was somewhere between 20–25 words per minute (WPM).
Now?
It’s around 75–80 WPM!
That increase didn’t happen overnight. It took years and years and years, but it was worth it.
After a while, you don’t even notice the increases, they just sort of happen.
At this point, I am at a personal ceiling for my typing speed, and I haven’t seen it increase in years.
But, given where it is, I am perfectly fine with that!
Split Up Your Engagement Time
A final tip for you before you go, but it’s an important one, so don’t skip it!
The final piece of advice that I must offer is that you ought to consider how you are splitting up your engagement time.
First, set an engagement goal for yourself each day, week, and month.
I don’t care if that goal is 10 comments, 20, 50, 100, or whatever.
Just make sure you have a personal goal and work on reaching that target.
Then, once you have that number in mind, I want you to split up your time as follows:
- 80–90% of your engagement is reversed for accounts you already follow
- 10–20% of your engagement is spent on new-to-you accounts
Some days, 100% of my engagement goes to accounts I already follow, and sometimes just 50% of it does.
However, over the long run, it averages out to roughly the percentages that I have mentioned above.
I do it this way because I want to keep my existing fanbase happy.
After all, they are the ones who got me to where I am now in the first place.
Of course, I also want to meet new users and expand my horizons, but I think that you shouldn’t aim at expanding out too rapidly or you will wear yourself thin.
Keep it real for the people that brought you to where you are now, and your follower count will still grow organically.
Why?
Because when you consistently show up for the people that you already follow, trust, and like, your comments will appear on their work consistently.
Guess who sees that?
Other users who also follow those accounts!
They are probably like-minded people, and they will see that you are a good and engaging member of the community.
It’s fairly common that they will then follow you!
That’s good news because you have then just gained a follower without any extra work on your part.
Best of all?
They are a follower with similar interests in all likelihood.
That’s what you want to do to grow your follower base and keep your earnings steadily growing as well.
Lily and I hope that you have gained a lot from this and that you can put these tactics to use on your own journey to experience the kind of growth that you want.
Don’t miss a thing! Sign up to receive e-mails every time Lily and I have something to say! Click here and you are in the club! (It’s completely free and the best way to support us!)
