How I gained 2000 followers on Medium, and how you can do it faster
I started this blog on programming on November 25, 2021. I hit two thousand followers on January 16, 2024. On my way, I have learned a few things that may get you there faster.
Insights and Actions
Get and show credibility early
This is the most important chart, and yet Medium does not generate it for you:
The red chart in the logarithmic scale (to the right) shows the number of my followers over time. The magenta bars in the linear scale (to the left) are the number of followers per thousand views of my articles.
In July 2023, I was awarded the Google Developer Experts membership, and you can see the dramatic increase in conversion from views to followers. Before GDE, it was under 4 followers per thousand views, and with GDE it mostly is well above 8 per thousand.
The increased conversion in the spring of 2022 should be disregarded as a statistical error of low absolute numbers of followers, that’s why the two metrics should be viewed together.
Why did the conversion increase?
I put the GDE branding on my userpic and mentioned it in my bio as other experts do, so it’s visible in every article:
My profile page before and after:
Another reason is that my topics changed a little bit. With the new title, I sometimes write about my career and not just technical things. Even in my technical articles, I casually mention my path, and it likely has an effect.
This can be seen if we break the conversion down to specific articles:
This chart shows a bubble for every article I published:
- Horizontally is the date when an article was published.
- Bubble size shows the lifetime number of views of an article.
- Vertically is the number of followers from an article per thousand views. This is underestimaged because when someone viewed an article, then viewed my profile and followed me, they are not counted as a follower from the article.
Outliers with low views should be disregarded. With low views, conversion can get randomly high or low.
That said, both effects can be seen:
- Career and other non-technical articles have a higher conversion.
- New articles in general have higher conversion, with fewer outliers with zero followers and more higher outliers.
This means you should seek memberships and other achievements so people listen to you better even if you are a good expert already. This is how the material world works.
Are you planning to apply for an award or a membership? Are you waiting until you get more followers to justify your nomination? Don’t wait if you are already in the hundreds and are otherwise eligible.
The chart also shows a whooping 37 followers per thousand views in January 2024. This is likely due to my anniversary retrospective article that performs exceptionally well. Or it can be an effect of people seeing “1K Followers” on my profile, which seems to be attractive all by itself. I will try to isolate this effect with more non-exceptional articles in the future. Follow me to get updates on this.
Followers don’t guarantee anything
Here are the daily views of my worst-performing article:
It had 26 views in 6 months, and only 7 of them were internal (visits from Medium and not external websites or apps).
I had been writing for 1.5 years when I published it, and I had 300 followers.
Medium does not suggest your articles to your followers automatically. It has some tricky recommendation engine. Following someone mostly changes your interests profile, and not much more. That article was outside of my main topics, so Medium did not show it to people.
Therefore, the followers on Medium only indicate how appealing your past writing was, multiplied by how well you fit the recommendation algorithms. Use your follower count to prove your status to someone (when applying for conferences, prestigious memberships, talent immigration programs, etc.), but it hardly is a tool for anything else.
If you are new, then your first story can perform even worse. If it does, just be aware that it’s normal here. You didn’t fail. You just didn’t rock, it’s different.
You will have arid days
This chart shows the lifetime views on my account. Each vertical line without a label is an article (except for the bleak grid).
The days when you don’t get any views are frequent. My last day with zero views was March 12, 2022. By then, I have published 5 articles.
My last day when I had less than 10 views was December 1, 2022, after a whole year of writing. I had 28 articles by then, and 90 followers.
My last day when I had less than 100 views was December 10, 2023, after whole two years of writing, when I had 59 articles and 700 followers.
Since most of the views are not your followers, you can assume that on a given day just a few percent of your followers read anything you wrote, a frustrating insight.
The best you can do is to be prepared for that and continue writing.
Early articles can succeed, too
Here are the daily views of my second article:
Over two years, it has been viewed 3200 times, which is good. It is my 9th most successful article out of 66.
Medium’s chart shows that the article was “distributed” a few days after being published:
This was the term for their early human curation program for quality content. It gave me the feeling of success early. “Distribution” has since been replaced by the “Boost” program, which is more choosy. I’m not sure how easy it is to get a boost of your early article now, but they say you can.
Give natural reasons to follow you
If you write well, some will follow you because they want more of the same. Not everyone has a conscious desire to do so. Help them see what they will get from following you.
There are cheesy ways to do that: “Follow me to read more on those new awesome widgets!” Such a call gives out that you don’t have a plan or long-lasting story, it is noise.
Compare this to an article on becoming a Google Developer Expert:
It was my highest converting article at the time (spare for a single outlier), with 4 times the conversion of my past writing:
In the article, I mentioned that the program gives me early access to new Google products and access to their developer teams, and I will be writing more. This one is rare and is a natural reason to follow.
Another example is my anniversary retrospective article:
This one went crazy popular and tripled my followers in less than a month.
What those articles have in common is they show high expertise in plain language without bragging, they make the profile stand out, and they make an impression that other content is valuable as well. This makes people hesitate less before following.
The final point in the anniversary article is that I was approved a petition for a green card of extraordinary ability, and I will publish most of that petition when I get the actual green card in a few months (this delay is natural because they may get harder on me if I publish it now). This is yet another reason to follow.
You may be sitting on a valuable bomb like those. Do you have rare titles? Did you make notable discoveries? Have you done things others consider outstanding? Write about them.
Boosts make it all
Medium has a program they call “Boost”. Their editors scout for good articles and boost them. Each boosted article gets at least 500 additional views from the recommendation engine. Depending on the reaction of those 500 viewers it can get much more.
Most of my followers came from the three articles that were boosted, so it’s crucial to learn from that.
Here are those articles:
The article is my 2nd most successful one, it got 22 thousand views. It stayed in the shadow and then suddenly exploded. I don’t have an explanation for the spike in early December 2022 that made the editors notice and boost it 3 months after publishing. Regarding the content, I believe it was a rare perspective on something common that people never thought to question.
Anyway, an article can get boosted up to 6 months after publishing. The program was new back then, so a lot of old pieces got boosted back then.
The second boosted article:
For some reason, Medium did not show it much beyond those 500 extra views, which is weird because it was my highest converting article ever, 7 times that of my early writings:
Maybe it’s because it had the lowest read ratio of my boosted stories:
Medium can’t afford to lose audience that way even if others like it enough to follow.
The third boosted article:
This is my highest-performing piece. As of writing, it has 43 thousand views and counting a thousand per day because it’s fresh. It has moved me from 700 to 2300 followers in less than a month. So the advice of getting a thousand followers could boil down to this thing alone, which I am afraid is not reproducible.
The best I can do is re-iterate: are you sitting on a valuable bomb and not writing about it?
These three boosted articles account for more than 2/3 of my followers. It sure is worth reading Medium’s guidelines for high-quality content. Articles that comply with it have a higher chance for a boost. Articles that heavily detour from it, have nearly zero chance.
Submit to popular publications
Articles are nominated for boosting either by Medium editors or by publication editors. Some of the latter are listed here. If you submit your article to a publication that can nominate articles for boosts, you potentially have a higher chance.
However, all three of my boosted articles are standalone. When I published the first one, there was no boost program. When I was publishing the other two, I was in a hurry for the anniversary date and had no time to wait for a publication’s review. Still, curators are out there scouting even for standalone pieces.
Only one of my articles was accepted to a popular publication: “How I became a Google Developer Expert in Flutter” in… well, “Google Developer Experts”. The publication has 32 thousand followers. I don’t remember the date when it was accepted, but it must be around this because of the traffic spike:
Ideally, you submit a draft to a publication. If a publication accepts an already published article, it will not show at the top of the recent ones, so editors rarely accept that. GDE accepted my piece mostly because it was about their program.
A publication with a lot of followers is not necessarily popular. One of the largest ones on Medium was BetterProgramming, run by Tony Stubblebine, a CEO at Medium. They asked me to submit an article, and I gave them a draft that turned to this:
You can see that they have 218 thousand followers. These statistics show their articles average almost 9 thousand views. However, my article only had 149 views in over a year, with the record low read ratio for my account:
I am allergic to stock photos for “productivity” like the one the publication editor put on my article. Maybe others are too. Or it could be that the publication showed the article to irrelevant audience. Anyway, study a publication before submitting your article to them.
Other tips
- If your management does not let you post corporate articles on your profile, show them this article of mine.
- My anniversary article has more small writing tips under section 13, “Go insanely public”.
Unsolved Problems
A lot of activity is still rolling with my anniversary retrospection article. Medium has been showing it on their homepage for all users, they also added it to “Staff Pick”, and even sent it to their subscribers in a dedicated email last week.
In the following months, I will see:
- How long those promotional effects last.
- How much of the recent high conversion is due to the specific articles and how much is just from people seeing “1K Followers”.
I think I will have estimates by the next milestone, which is 10 thousand followers.
How to make your own charts like these
I made a script that produces these charts that Medium lacks. It’s hacky, you must run it in the browser’s console:
But it’s all in the README. You can get it on my GitHub (don’t forget to star). Or you can wait until I make a browser extension from it. I will announce the browser extension separately.
Follow me here, on Telegram, and on Twitter to not miss that announcement and other stories.
