What I Learned My First Three Months on Medium and How This Can Help Your Writing
What are the Lessons for You
I have finally cracked the 100 followers threshold. What have I learned works and what have I learned does not work.
There is a lot of advice on Medium on how to create an audience on Medium. Some are the outliers that gain 10,000 followers overnight and there are those that struggle to gain much of a following for months and then one of their articles goes viral. Or maybe they never get a viral article and toil in obscurity for months and quit. I am kinda in the middle of all that. 91% of those who write on Medium make less than $100 per month.
What have I found that works.
My Success
Two of my articles to date has gone viral. This one is about the American Chestnut.
It has been viewed nearly one thousand times and read over seven hundred times. It is by far my most read article. I did not do much as far as promotion for it. I simply wrote it and submitted it to the publication Weeds and Wildflowers.
The moderator, Dennet,for this publication is very supportive of writers who submit articles to her publication. All of my submissions have been published and she always makes sure to leave a comment on your article. That leads to more views for your work.
My second most-read article is not unrelated to my most read article. Another end of the spectrum on topic and tone and was not submitted to a publication. It was a light technical article on why I am learning Rust.
Like I said it was not submitted to a publication but was nevertheless my second most-read article. As of now it has been read over two hundred and fifty times and viewed twice as many times.
How do you decide what to write
So how do you select what to write? To start you have to go with what you know and are passionate about. Your writing will not be interesting to readers if you write just for views. Your writing would not have a noticed passion to it without. If you love bonsai then write about that. If you find Emily Dickinson intriguing, as I do, then write about her poetry. The point is to start with what interests you most and develop your unique voice.
Experimenting too is also key to gaining an understanding of what people want from this publication. I have done a lot of research on yogic or pranayama breathing techniques. And though it is a passion of mine not one of my articles on that subject has gone viral or even had over ten reads. Medium is not the place for such writing, I have found. In that series, this is my most read article.
I plan to finish my series on pranayama breathing on Medium and republishing on Core Spirit. In the future, articles will be mostly published over on Core Spirit instead.
What works
So what do I think works? Consistency. Show up consistently. Some authors write on Medium every day. I have done that sometimes and it does not seem to increase my rate of reads and followers more than publishing once a day.
Interact with those who follow you. Comment on their stories or leave a clap or ten. Support those who follow you. It will come back to you. The more your articles are interacted with, the more likely the algorithm will support your writing too. The more you interact with other writers helps them as well.
And follow writers whose work interests you the most. Follow-for-follow is not going to get you anywhere. There are some who are marketing courses around how to get views and reads on Medium and one tactic is follow-for-follow. Here is a list of articles on follow-for-follow. I’ll let the list speak for itself.
Sticking to a few topics is better than the broader shotgun approach I have taken. In copy, grant, and blog writing there is a lot of debate around picking a niche. You don’t have to pick a niche for your writing, but I think it allows readers to know what type of content they will get when know you specialize. It has been the case for me. I now write on crypto, nature and wild foraging, and mindset topics. And that should be enough topics for me to concentrate on for now.
Thank you
