13. How I grew my Medium following 6500%— 30 Days Of Medium
Welcome back to 30 Days Of Medium.
Today I’m going to show you how I grew my Medium following 6500% in 30 days, and prove the point of my last article in the process.
You can catch up on the first 12 days of my Medium challenge below if you missed them:
0. 30 Days Of Medium
1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium
2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium
3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium
4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium
5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium
6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium
7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium
8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium
9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium
10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium
11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium
12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium
13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium
14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium
15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium
16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium
17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium
18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium
19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium
20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium
21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium
22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium
23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium
24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium
25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium
26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium
27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium
28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium
29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium
30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium
Starting from scratch
I joined the Medium platform on March 17th, 46 days ago.
I had never used Medium before and as I wrote in the first entry of 30 Days of Medium, boy I wish I’d signed up sooner.
Wet behind the ears and new to Medium, I decide to create a lengthy well researched post.
That post was Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On
Well, that didn’t work
I published my post and it fell flat immediately.
It didn’t make sense to me, because I spent a long time researching it and jam packing it with value.
I decided to do some digging and find out what I’d done wrong.
Discovering Publications
I read a lot of articles on how to grow your Medium following and quickly discovered Medium publications.
I already loved the idea of Medium and its publishing system, publications sealed the deal for me.
The idea that I could write my content for established publications with captive readers who were my target audience wow’ed me.
It was like being able to guest blog on a big website, but better.
Joining The Startup
I really liked the look of The Startup, so I reached out to them and submitted my post, letting them know it was fresh off the press and I was happy to publish it exclusively through them.
They obviously liked the look of it too, because they accepted my post and allowed me to become a writer for their awesome publication (thanks once again!). It’s still to this day the best Medium publication as far as I’m concerned.
Liftoff
It obviously worked. Check out the stats below. The first red arrow shows the lousy reception my post got when I self published. The second one shows the first day it went live on The Startup.
I decided to focus solely on writing for The Startup as their audience was my audience, and my growth would contribute to their growth over time.
My first 15 days
When I started on Medium I had 0 views, 0 reads and 0 followers.
In my first 15 days on the platform I managed to rack up:
292 views
37 reads
11 fans
0 followers
All of this was effectively from one post, my Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On post.
I self published another small WordPress post before the end of the month but got basically no traction on it again.
My next 30 days
Towards the end of my first 15 days on Medium I decided to start this challenge, that I would write one post every day for 30 days about how to build, grow and scale a business online.
30 days on and here are my stats.
2772 views (849% increase)
1000 reads (2602% increase)
121 fans (1000% increase)
65 followers (6,500% increase)
Pretty darn good if you ask me. I was super happy with my growth.
By no means am I Larry Kim but from a standing start with 0 followers and no preexisting following I think this is amazing and it’s all down to the Medium platform.
Proving my point
In my last article I talked about the importance of catchy headlines and I gave this article a deliberately super intriguing headline for a reason, to see if I can hit my all time high views on a post.
What have I learned so far?
Firstly, I’ve still got a long way to go.
As far as views and readership goes, mine is tiny. I plan on changing that over the next few months, because I love Medium.
I’ve also learned:
- Headlines drive views
- Great content drives reads
- Connecting with your audience drives claps
- Posting regularly helps increase the amount of views I see and ultimately how quickly my readership grows
- Medium readers favour shorter, snappier posts as opposed to long form content
- Using tags correctly helps drive views
- Writing for a publication is a great option if you don’t have an existing authorship. It helps you grow your readership and it helps the publication thrive with fresh content relevant to its audience.
- The Medium stats dashboard is awesome
What’s next?
I’ve just joined The Medium Partner programme and will soon try out some paid posts.
I’d like to see how much I can earn writing on Medium and sharing useful, valuable content on a daily basis.
17 more days to go
I’m only 13 days deep into my 30 Days of Medium challenge, so I still have over half of the challenge to go.
I’m interested to see how the next 30 days goes and if I can keep up the same sort of readership and metric growth.
I’ll write another post like this at the end of my challenge and let you know how it goes.
Any questions on this topic? Let me know in the comments.
You might also like this:
Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On
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This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 321,672+ people.
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