Focus On The Right Stat For Curation
There’s ONE metric you’re probably overlooking right now
Stop looking at the wrong stat for curation
Aim for fans, not claps
As a medium writer, it’s a fantastic feeling to receive an email from Medium saying that your article has been curated. It lifts your mood up like nothing else.
Yet, we focus on the wrong stats while waiting to be curated. We look at the number of views, reads, total member reading time, and claps for each article. But we miss one key metric that Medium finds very useful.
Fans
You can get as many claps as you want, but if you don’t have lots of unique fans clapping for your article, you probably won’t get curated.
50 fans giving you 1 clap each is better than 5 fans giving you 50 claps each.
If you do the math, it looks like 50 is lower than 250, and it is. But 50 is greater than 5 when you consider fans.
Medium curators look at how many people found your content worthy of clapping for, rather than just how many claps they give you.
Think about it, if five people took the time to clap till the count hits 50, they must’ve really loved it, which is excellent.
But if many people have viewed it and only five clapped, that shows that although it is quite valuable, it’s not beneficial to most people.
For instance, an article that teaches you how to extract a particular component from a fossil could be very detailed and meticulously written to be a guide in itself. But in reality, how many of us have access to a fossil that we want to analyze? Not a whole lot.
Despite being highly informative and well written, most people might find it interesting, although not very valuable.
Curators know
Curators get this. They want to show articles that can help almost anyone. They select well-written articles that provide significant value and insight to help as many people as possible. And it has to be specific to that topic.
They promote articles that readers love, and they use the number of fans to understand how many readers and how much they love your work.
You would read something that could make your life better or entertain you instead of something directed at a niche audience that you don’t relate to very well.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t write in your niche. In fact, provided you have a great article, you could be curated for the topic you wrote about.
Part of it is just getting lucky or getting it on a publication whose readers love your style and content.
It’s often different for everyone, but one thing is for sure -
Fans matter.
To make sure I asked Medium Support and this is what they said -
Having more unique fans clapping for your posts will increase the distribution to other readers interested in the topics you are writing about.
Takeaway
We love getting a notification that someone clapped for our article. And seeing the claps jump as some people go all the way to 50 is even better.
But if you want to catch a curator’s eye, focus on how many people will find it helpful enough that they leave your article with a new thought in their mind and the willingness to press and hold the button to give you the claps they think you deserve.
