How To Get Followers and Claps Even If You Don’t Write Articles?
I’ve written 1,000 comments. Share what I learned.
In the past few months, I’ve written 1k+ comments. Besides, I read about 20,000 comments from others. What did I learn?
This is an effective way to quickly get to the essense of an article. Why?
Recall how you read.
The first thing I do when I open an article is check the comments section. Even if you are not a paid member of Medium and don’t see the bottom part of the articles, you can see quotes from whole text.
If there are few of them and there are no excerpts from the text, maybe it is not so good. In our age of clickbait titles, this is especially important.
Then I look at subscriptions and if the author does not have many, then it is worth checking the whole text since its visibility was simply not enough for comments.
After that, I quickly scroll down the text and look at its sections: subheadings, lists, and quotes.
If it is a wall of text, then most likely the author was unable to structure their thoughts properly. Sorry, I have no extra time to dig up the meaning there, next.
Why even bother to write comments if I could just write an article?
I wrote more about it in this article:
If I were to start all over again on Medium, I wouldn’t write any articles at all for the first 1–2 months. Why?
For my first 10+ articles, I received almost no views, claps, and comments and this discouraged me from continuing. What would I do instead?
Just read other people’s articles and write comments. I receive a response usualy pretty quickly. It’s kept me here.
“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” — Winston Churchill
Reasons why comments are the most important part of the article
Learning. This is the most effective way to understand the main popular topics on the Medium and feedback from readers.
Writing. I expanded some of the comments I wrote into articles. Any good article, first of all, is a well-chosen pain point.
This means there are several solutions for it and you may know one of them.
The easiest way to choose which comments should be expanded into an article is to look at the feedback of your comment in the form of claps and comments.
Tribe. A comment is a sample of your ideas that you show to a large audience. This way you can find like-minded people.
Visibility. Medium’s algorithm takes into account the comments you write and increases your place in the list of recommended authors.
Some very good authors on Medium have a rule for any of your comments, read your latest article and write a comment on it.
How to do it effectively?
Recommendations
Format. Do not correct the author. Firstly, some may be offended. Secondly, there are reasons why an author made it this way which you don’t understand yet.
It’s better to write about your experience on this topic or make a joke (my favorite option).
Quality. Do not write uninformative comments like “Yes”; “Agree”; Thanks for sharing.” You are not AI, right?
At least choose an interesting idea in the text (Medium has a very convenient tool for making highlights and quotes).
You write comments not only for the author but also for subsequent readers.
We are supposed to be a community, are we?
Quantity. Write a lot of comments. If an article is really good you can write two or three.
Claps. Don’t be greedy in clapping (it’s an endless resource). You do it for yourself aswell: the more popular an article becomes, the more popular your comment will be.
Sometimes comments are the main reason that turn a regular article into a viral sensation.
Help. Only writers truly know how important it is to receive feedback. The average reader cannot understand this, so help your colleagues.
You can make authors’ days brighter, spark discussions, and even summon the occasional laughter.
“We rise by lifting others.” — Robert Ingersoll
