My Second Month on Medium
Finally Seeing Some Growth
It has been almost exactly 2 months since I decided to write on Medium consistently.
I had already been writing on Medium for about 3 months, but back then it was just to test out the platform, publishing an article a month of admittedly poor quality. However, around June when I started to put some effort to grow on the platform.
This is a look at what an average writer might expect on Medium.
This isn’t going to be another article about “How I Gained 100 Followers in only 2 days”.
While those people have certainly worked hard, they are few and far between. It can feel discouraging as a new writer to read those kinds of stories because people only put out their best accomplishments.
So here is something much more attainable, maybe something to make you feel better or set as a realistic goal on Medium.
I started writing on Medium without knowing anything. I didn’t know how to write articles, how to grow a following, or even what to write about. In these two months, I have certainly learned a lot and if you’re a new writer this is my advice.
I talk about my circumstance, my initial views and beginning advice I learned in my article about my first month on Medium. Check it out for more insight.
But to give an idea of what type of writer you’re looking at.
- I write weekly or bi-weekly, this isn’t my full focus on life and is more a side hobby.
- I don’t share my stories or articles on social media. So I don’t get any external views
- I haven’t gotten into a “niche” yet. I still write about pretty much whatever I find interesting, but I generally talk about life lessons, technology, and productivity.
How Much I Made
If you read “My First Month On Medium” the answer hasn’t changed.
$0 no matter which way you look at it.
Now to be fair, this isn’t because all of my articles have tanked. It’s more because I’m not in the MPP (Medium Partner Program)… at least not yet.
To qualify for the MPP, you have to pass these requirements:
- Have posted at least 1 story, and responses don’t count
- Be in an eligible country where Stripe (their payment method) is available
- Have 100 followers
- Be at least 18 with taxpayer information
So let’s see, I have posted more than 1 story, I live in a country where Stripe is available, and I have 100 followers; the only thing stopping me is that I am only 17. So it seems that I have to wait at least 9 months before I can give this report on earnings.
My Stats
This is something I can actually show. Just to recap, this is what my first actual month looked like on Medium.
I posted 2 articles, and you can see exactly when.
It is important to note that I was part of the publication New Writers Welcome, why is this important? If I didn’t publish there I would’ve likely gotten 0 views on those articles.
The publication helped garner that initial traffic for the 2 days the stories were on the site, but then it would promptly just be never seen.
Here is my first month of writing consistently.
Here I pointed out in my original article that this was something achievable for most people. I think this is what the average writer that writes semi-consistently could expect. Maybe you’ll see better results but I labeled this month as “a humbling experience”.
It’s not the extravagant views some people might’ve expected when starting out, but it was progressing and I can tell it would grow from here.
Here is my second month.
The growth came indeed
Technically, this isn’t exactly 1 month after, but I want to set make this a series where at the start of each month I talk about my experiences on Medium and what I have learned on the platform.
I published 6 articles during July and all of them got more than 20 views, which is how many views my best article in June got.
In terms of trends. I had two outlier articles that got more views than the others. Those being This Article Was Written By an A.I. and How I Made it to 100 Followers each getting more than 150 views.
I had reached a point where I would get on average 30 views even on the days I didn’t publish.
You Can Do the Same
I believe that if I was able to do this, you can definitely do it. I do spend a couple of hours a day either writing, or engaging with other posts, the more I read the more I started to see trends on how people write, what they write about, and how they present their stories.
Again, I have read many articles where they talk about their meteoric rise on the platform in such a short amount of time; this is much more of what an average writer might expect. You’ll probably see more growth if you are promoting your articles externally unlike me.
So I would like to update the list of things I have learned in my first month with what I have learned in my second month. So if you haven’t already you can implement the same things.
What I Learnt
1. Engagement
The biggest contributor to my growth from last month is that I started to engage with other readers on the platform.
Read, clap, and comment on articles and people you align with and find their content interesting. This is sort of an internal way to externally promote. Instead of hoping for the Medium algorithm to promote your story to those initial readers, the writers who you’ve engaged can be those readers and give your story a boost in the algorithm.
We are all writers aiming for the same goal, go out and let them know.
2. Article Length
Article length is one of the main contributors to your reads, views, and engagement.
I’m talking purely from experience, this is what I’ve observed and it can be different for you.
Assuming you have an interesting article and the reader reads the whole thing, a longer article with more read-time and engagement will be promoted by the algorithm.
So, instead of writing 1–2 minute articles which would need more views to get the same total read-time; writing 4–5 minute articles would get the same read-time with fewer views (assuming the reader reads the whole thing).
Now, this doesn’t mean you have to find a way to cram in extra words and bog your article down.
You should never sacrifice the quality of the article for the sake of making it longer.
If you write about poems, then it doesn’t make sense to publish a 10-minute poem. This is all based on what you write, for the stuff I write, 4–5 minutes is the sweet spot. Some articles may require it to be 10 minutes to be optimal, others less than a minute, it all depends on what you write.
But keep in mind the length of the article, just like tags and thumbnails, it’s another factor that you can adjust to optimize the performance of that article.
3. Formatting Your Articles
I’m going to double-down on my tip from My First Month on Medium, where I mentioned
There is a big difference between how we’re taught at school to write essays and how to format an engaging article.
I still stand by that statement, but I have learned so much more since then.
When I said that, I was mainly talking about the fact that we don’t write in a paragraph structure to engage readers, we mainly break up the formatting into blocks of one or two sentences.
What I have learnt since then is that you have more tools in Medium to engage the reader. These tools can help break up information from the mundane plain text.
Bold your text for key information
There are two types of quotations:
this one
and this one
- Bullet points
- for
- lists
- Numbering
- As another form of
- lists
Separate sections of text with either
Headings
Subheadings
or with this
Use these when appropriate. You have to use them fairly often to not bore the reader with plain text, but not go overboard as to insult the audience’s attention span.
Again, this isn’t a universal tip for everyone, depending on what you write it will be different. Those that write more about stories will use lists and bolding less than those that have informative articles, so figure out the right amount for what you write.
Conclusion
I am nowhere near as consistent or talented as some of the top writers on the platform who gained hundreds of followers in their first month. But, I use this as a way to present the average writer and hopefully, you have some inspiration to go out there can keep writing.
Write What You Love, Love What You Write
