What I’ve Learned From Publishing 100+ Stories
The results will surprise you
Medium is full of people’s articles telling you how successful they’ve been. How they manage to write x number of words and earn x number of dollars in a month.
This isn’t one of those articles.
This article is the opposite. In this article, I’m going to give you my totally average, perhaps less than average, experience of Medium.
I’ve published over 100 articles and I’ve learned absolutely nothing.
I’m no wiser now than I was at the beginning.
There were a couple of months where I felt things might be on the up, and I got a lot of responses on a few articles I wrote, and I did in fact make a whole $70 one month - but that was my peak.
Not that it’s all about the money.
Let’s think about followers instead. Yes, I have more followers than when I started. Over 600.
When I started, I would sometimes look at people who had 500/600 followers with huge envy.
But now I’m there, I’ve realised that nothing has changed.
While I’m so grateful to the people that have followed me, I’m still looking at other people with envy, only now it’s the people who have 1K followers, or 2K or more.
You think you’re going to feel this incredible awe when you reach 100, 200 followers etc, but all that happens is you start looking to the next milestone.
I could go on chasing more followers indefinitely.
Incidentally though, more followers haven’t led to more engagement. In fact, some of my earlier stories that I wrote with 100–200 followers got a lot more attention than the ones I write now.
I frequently get less than 100 claps on an article I publish these days, maybe 10–30 reads. I count one or two comments on an article as pretty good, and if it earns anything close to $1 that’s progress.
I’ve read lots of articles recently along the lines of “If no one’s reading your articles, you’re doing the right thing,” and “don’t focus on the stats, focus on the process.”
Well, I think that’s bollocks.
I try not to think about them much, but I do keep an eye on the stats. How else do I know if what I’m writing is reaching an audience?
I came to Medium not for the promise of big money fast (although it would be nice), but because I wanted to share my voice.
I’ve shared it, but not so many people are listening.
I’ve spent a lot of time writing (although I’ve almost never been able to achieve posting 5/6 articles a week, which is my goal) and I’ve enjoyed the process, but I wouldn’t say that I’ve been successful by any metric aside from growing my followers.
In terms of amount of engagement and money earned, I’m a D+ at best.
In terms of skills of writing, I have no idea if I’ve got better or worse. I have learned to put more line breaks in my articles and that’s about it.
It leaves me at a cross-road.
Do I keep writing, hoping to get better, knowing that not many people will read or relate to what I’ve written?
Or do I dedicate my time to something else and admit that while this was a good experiment, it isn’t for me?
I’m not even sure which way I’ll go.
