3 Strategies That Increase Your Articles’ Flywheel Effect On Medium

And tips on how to increase your articles’ visibility

The Flywheel Effect is a concept developed by Stanford Professor Jim Collins in the book Good to Great. He highlights that overnight transformations never happen. Rather, good-to-great transformations occur through the consistent act of doing a lot of little things well, with their results compounding over time.

“In building a great company or social sector enterprise, there is no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.” ~ Jim Collins: from www.jimcollins.com

The Flywheel Effect: For Medium Writers

Google “How to increase the visibility of Medium articles?” and seven optimization tips appear in a featured snippet, included in black text below.

In this article, I develop strategies that writers can use to substitute three of the seven tips Google promotes and explain why they are more optimal. Combining these strategies, along with incorporating a thorough writing process, can help writers build the necessary momentum to establish the Flywheel Effect for their articles posted on Medium.

Utilize Reddit

On reddit.com click on “View All” and scroll to the “Browse Communities A-Z” section. Click through the alphabetized list of communities (“subreddits”), of which there are thousands. Compile a list of subreddits that follow the themes of your articles and rank them by relevance/number of members. Contribute to the discussions in the top dozen or so subreddits on your list to build “karma” points (some subreddits institute a minimum karma point threshold to participate; accumulate karma points by contributing to subreddits that do not impose karma point restrictions). After several weeks you should be able to share your articles on most of the subreddits you have followed. Include a brief statement of an article’s relevance to that subreddit. Never post irrelevant articles. Consider contributing your article to a subreddit in the morning and posting it on a different subreddit in the afternoon. Publishing the same article too often may be flagged as spam. Over the course of a week, you should be able to share an article with various relevant subreddits each containing a few hundred to upwards of a million “Redditors”.

Reddit’s Flywheel Effect

Relevant articles tend to be shared by Redditors outside of reddit.com, helping improve their organic ranking on search engines like Google. The external referral metrics shown in the screenshot illustrate how a recent article I published fared on google.com (not using paid ads) and reddit.com. Causality cannot be determined using these metrics. Luckily, a determination of causality is unnecessary. Understanding that the combined actions added momentum to the flywheel suffices: in this case, the rate of the increase related to the “email, IM, and direct” and “google.com” referral metrics grew after I posted the article on Reddit.

Cost: $0 (The basic Reddit membership is free.)

What Google got wrong regarding strategy #2 “spend a few bucks on social ads”: people dislike ads. Moreover, *browser histories used to identify a target audience do not always correspond to the desirability to further read about a topic. The bang for the “social ads” buck, therefore, is unclear. Reddit, on the other hand, introduces posts to readers organically in light of their active participation on a given subreddit. The more relevant an article is to the subreddit the more upvotes it will receive, enabling it to gain further visibility. (*On March 3, 2021, Google announced it would utilize AI and raw data to sell ads instead of relying on users’ browser histories stored on Google servers. The efficacy of Google’s ads will likely remain robust; how this development will impact certain types of ads, however, is unclear.)

Include Hyperlinks To Your Articles At The End Of Each Story

Readers that valued reading one of your articles could be keen on reading other articles you have written. If so, their interest might be fleeting. Reduce the friction between eager readers’ interest in your written content and their ability to locate it by including clearly denoted hyperlinks to your articles at the end of each story you have written. Include short descriptive hyperlinked phrases for each article. My older articles’ view/read metrics increased when I began appending to them the hyperlinks below.

Hyperlinks’ Flywheel Effect

Hyperlinking your articles results in free targeted advertising to a key demographic: one that found at least one of your articles compelling enough to finish reading it. Organically generated internal views like these also increase the chances that paying Medium members will read your articles and nudge non-member readers to become paying members. Both of which increase your earning potential.

Cost: $0

What Google got wrong regarding strategy #4 “Kill underperforming posts and bring them back”: the act of hyperlinking articles is more efficient than tweaking or rewriting them. If an article underperforms, do not “kill” it. It may have yet to reach its targeted audience. Give your future readers a chance to discover your past work easily. They may resonate with it. If you have written many articles, hyperlink batches of 20 different articles at the end of your articles. Or select your Top 20 and hyperlink those to all your articles. (Appropriately placed hyperlinks included within the text of your stories can also work.)

Create A Personal Blog & Utilize YouTube

If you are committed to giving yourself the best chance to succeed as a writer, consider setting up a personal blog and even creating video content to capture their synergetic benefits. A simple barebones blog does the job at the beginning. See screenshot.

Personal Blog: while some Medium publications expose your articles to an extensive audience, articles on Medium are limited to five tags. On a blog, one can affix more tags to an article (for certain topics, up to 10 tags are optimal) which can further improve its Search Engine Optimization. Moreover, in the unfortunate event Medium is shut down or closes your account, your articles will still have a home on the interwebs via your personal blog. (Ditto for YouTube vis-a-vis your videos.)

Cost: $0 (Using a free blog host.) to $150/year (Using an https domain name.)

YouTube: use your original written content as a script to create video content or tweak it to make it YouTube-friendly. Video content can take the form of traditionally recorded videos or animated videos (or some combination thereof) that can be created using platforms like Dooddly or VideoScribe. Soundtracks, voiceovers, and segments of other videos can be incorporated. I recently purchased a membership to the Dooddly platform with the intent to post animated videos on YouTube and my blog.

Cost: $0 (Using a smartphone.) to $164 (Doodly: one-time fees $67+$97)

Personal Blog/YouTube’s Flywheel Effect

Including hyperlinks at the end of videos/written content can be used to direct viewers/readers to your other digital offerings. Videos also make a personal blog more dynamic and can generate revenue on YouTube; they can also be repurposed on social media platforms. Bloggers with sufficient digital traffic can eventually monetize their blogs by offering subscription-based newsletters, for instance. If your goal is to optimize your earning potential on Medium, redirect traffic to your articles posted on Medium. A multimedia strategy creates a Flywheel Effect that increases the visibility of written content and its earning potential.

What Google got wrong regarding strategy #6 “Follow people who like your posts”: following people in the hopes that they reciprocate is overrated. Someone who liked your story yet still did not follow you probably does not care to follow you. Think strategically when seeking to identify levers that are really worth pulling. A personal blog and YouTube could be two such levers. Do the little things required to become worthy of being followed, and people will follow you.

Thorough Writing Process + Flywheel Effect: Success

The Flywheel Effect requires that writers do the little things well to increase the visibility of their articles. But doing the little things well is also the key to developing a thorough writing process.

Research: when possible rely on data instead of assumptions
Edit the article as many times as necessary
Allow ample time for your subconscious to ruminate on the article
Iterated/pivot the written content as required
Edit some more
Have someone proofread your writing
Iterated/pivot the written content as necessary per proofreader’s advice
Edit some more, etc.

The three strategies covered herein offer examples of how Medium writers can incorporate the Flywheel Effect in their articles’ distribution process.

Writers, however, should also seek to leverage their unique skill sets and contacts (and serendipity that may occur) to add momentum to their flywheel.

Combining a personalized Flywheel Effect with a thorough writing process are ultimately the keys to breakthrough success.

On Medium, and beyond.

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