5 Things I Learned Posting On Medium Every Day For 30 Days
I’m both a writer in want of a successful platform and a big fan of 30 day challenges, so when I saw another article about someone’s 30 day 30 articles challenge, I was in.
Before then, since joining in the summer of 2019, I had about 10 or 15 followers and one or two views and reads per article, reposting the blogs on my website once or twice a month. The only article that got any significant reads was a short story I published in The Junction in October.
I think it would be fair to say the challenge was a moderate success, given where I started. Growth throughout the 30 days, which lasted from December 15th to January 15th was steady and reaffirming.
The major numbers to report are 190 followers acquired, 1281 views, 594 reads, 115 fans, and $6 made (.85 c in the last 15 days of December and 5.15 in the first 15 days of January)
All in all it was a positive experience. I’m going to keep posting three or four times a week, but without the added pressure of “I have to post today,” which would sometimes get in the way of the time I put aside to write fiction.
Here’s a breakdown of my views, with a description of what was going on during that portion:
Note: the 5 things I’ve learned may only be true for someone with 196 followers, and your mileage may vary, but this was my experience, so far, as someone relatively new to the platform
Publications matter (a lot)
For someone like me, who started with less than ten followers, publications were (and still are) crucial to growing my audience and reaching people who I wouldn’t normally reach.
My first publication, Reflections of 419 Days of Sobriety, which I syndicated in the publication Recovery International, saw a large spike in reads and followers.
Reflections On 419 Days Of Sobriety
Supercharge your life by cutting out one, unnecessary habit.
medium.com
It took me nearly two weeks to realize that I could ask publications to publish already published material, asking them if they’d be interested in “syndicating” an article. With quite a few articles already published (about 25 at this point), I started reaching out personally to editors of publications.
I discovered that you can type ‘about’ after the publications name in a URL, which would tell you the writers and editors of a publication.
You can then find their email or Twitter and reach out to them personally. I had a lot more luck getting my work published this way.
This method also let to me getting my poetry collection Before Oblivion published in the Creative Cafe, one poem at a time.
All This Shrubbery by Ian Canon
From the collection Before Oblivion
thecreative.cafe
Followers don’t matter all that much (so far)
It’s very possible that you don’t start seeing a very big impact with regards to follower views until you hit a certain benchmark—possibly in the 1000s, but with only 190 followers my posts would sometimes only reach 1 or 2 of my followers.
To confirm this, I didn’t post my articles anywhere on the 11th and 12th of January and both of those stories reached 1 person each.
It also seems that, in order to reach more internal followers, Medium actually wants to reach non-followers, and once it has been clapped or read by other followers, it starts to distribute your work to your followers.
What I did try, for a few days, was going to my favourite publications and, using the /about method I talked about earlier, following all the writers for those publications. It certainly helped me add followers, but I’m not sure this is a valuable long-term solution.
It puts my follower / follow ratio off-whack and the followers you do get may not be all that valuable. I may think about doing this again if someone can recommend me a way to easily find out who isn’t following you back, but I couldn’t figure that out.
Facebook Ads are almost useless
I work in digital marketing, and have found a variety of great audiences who consume my website blogs, sign up to my newsletter, and download my lead magnets at a very affordable rate.
I wrote an article about the process I went through to find these audiences.
Steal This Method To Get 10 Subscribers A Day To Your Author’s Blog
Jane Friedman, in her book The Business Of Being A Writer, said that email lists are the single most important tool a…
medium.com
But one thing these audiences weren’t very good for was reading my Medium articles.
They would get a lot of views, but very little reads, and I don’t think a single one was ever a member read.
If I could find out how to specifically target Medium members on Facebook, this may still prove a profitable and effective method, but as of right now, there’s no way to directly target Medium members.
A possible way to do this may be to create a Lookalike from a Medium member email list, but that’s not likely to happen anytime in the near future.
Facebook groups are a great way to get free views
Medium groups are a great way to get views when you don’t have followers. One of my stories got a lot of engagement on a particular group, so it stayed on top of the group for a few days, netting me my highest paid article (just under a dollar). I got a ton of organic clicks from Medium members this way and noticed that if I didn’t share my articles on the groups, Medium generally wouldn’t show it to any of my followers, either.
Here are the Medium groups that I am a member of:
Engage with other Medium members
Medium isn’t just a website to share your own writing. It’s also a social platform, and a week or so into my budding Medium career, I gave myself a rule.
I was, at the time, addicted to checking my stats, or the dopamine rush of seeing a notification, and I couldn’t stop opening the program. So every time I opened the program, I had to now do something to increase my following. I wanted to use my addiction for a positive feedback loop, and it worked.
Every time I opened the app or website, I read articles, clapped for the article, responded to responses, wrote my own responses, clapped for everyone else’s responses, highlighted articles, followed people I actually enjoyed, and interacted with as many people as I could.
I found, after doing this, that I got more enjoyment out of the platform than I did when I was merely keeping to myself. I started to be more social, learned more, and discovered writers I would have never known of.
I’m now looking forward to many more 30 day challenges on Medium, meeting more people, and publishing a few hundred more articles!
Ian Canon is the author of It’s A Long Way Down (2018) and Before Oblivion (2017). His second novel What We Do On Weekends is forthcoming. His stories have been featured in The Junction, The Sunlight Press, The Spadina Literary Review, Found Polaroids, and he’s been profiled for Vue.
