1 Proven Trick to Attract New Followers Here
Not another article about writing on Medium!
I hate writing about writing, but I have something important to say.
Are you a newbie here? If you are, this article is for you.
You may choose to ask fellow writers to follow you or follow them with the hope that they follow you back (the so-called follow-for-follow that I’m not particularly a fan of), or simply write as many articles as you can to get your name out there. These tactics to attract new followers are all efficient, but there’s just one that tops them all, in my opinion.
You’ve probably guessed it. Engage. Engage. Engage.
There were a lot of writers I didn’t have to follow whose content I engaged with, and they gladly followed me. By engaging, I’m talking about reading the entire article, highlighting, clapping, and leaving a thoughtful comment to show that you read, understood, resonated, and learned something from that article. This is a legit way to build yourself a new readership fast.
It has worked 97% of the time for me. A lot of Medium writers found me in the comments section of other writers’ stories. This gets me a new follower almost every day. I got my very first Medium follower this way. I hadn’t posted any articles at the time. I simply clapped once since I had no idea at the time that you could clap more than once and left a long, thoughtful comment on one of her stories, and she followed me.
You don’t even have to ask anyone to follow you in the comments unless you want to. You simply have to keep it real and relevant to the article and let nature take its course.
People who choose to follow you after you’ve engaged with their content often don’t ask you to follow them back, at least from my experience. So, you don’t feel obliged to follow them back because they followed you willingly without you having asked them to.
Besides, people can tell when you’re being genuine in the comments or when you’re being clever.
So, to build and maintain a genuine connection with fellow writers, read and engage with the articles that genuinely interest you, or even better, follow the writers who wrote them. They will reciprocate if they want to, and if they don’t, you’ll be okay because you wouldn’t be expecting anything in return anyway.
In other words, in order to build yourself an audience of like-minded Medium readers and writers, besides doing the obvious, which is writing and publishing valuable and high-quality content targeted at your audience, you must support these writers the same way you’d like them to support you without reminding them of how you’ve supported them and thus, asking them to do the same for you. Catch my drift?
You don’t want to come across as entitled or an emotional blackmailer. This is like treating people how you’d like them to treat you.
Let’s engage.
