4 Growth Tips I Learned Getting 5,689 Views on Medium This Month

I’m very excited about Medium as a platform for writers and marketers to reach new audiences. I think of it like YouTube for articles.

If you’re going to write or produce any kind of content, you need a way to get people to your work. Simply hitting publish on your website that has zero traffic is not enough anymore.

Fortunately, there are numerous platforms with massive user bases that you can tap into.

If you’re going to publish on your own website, your two best sources of traffic will likely be search (SEO) or social shares— search being the better of the two.

But search is not always a viable strategy. It depends on your market. In some markets there are many content creators, making it difficult to outrank the competition.

The key is to find a channel where there is significant demand for your topic and relatively little supply. Google and YouTube have been around forever and have attracted many content creators. Meanwhile Medium is still relatively new and doesn’t have as much competition.

That’s why I decided to increase my publishing and promotion efforts on Medium.

I published my first story on Medium about two years ago. I’ve had the occasional big hit, but I had been mostly just getting a few hundred views per article.

This month was different though. This was one of my best months ever. I gained 5,689 views after receiving only 2,127 views during the 30 days prior.

This post covers the results I achieved, what I did to get them, what I learned in the process, and how my strategy will change going forward as a result.

Here are the highlights from the past 30 days:

1. I published one of my worst performing stories of all time.
2. I published one of my best performing stories of all time.
3. I published more frequently than usual — 5 articles.
4. I received more views than any previous 30 days — 5,689.

Here’s what I learned from all this:

1. Starting a publication is hard — keep writing for big ones.

This month I published one of my worst performing stories of all time. As you can see below, I gained almost zero traffic from Medium. That’s despite having over 4,200 followers.

It definitely wasn’t my best story ever, but I thought it was great and was really excited to share it.

So what went wrong?

For one, I published it on my publication. My publication only has 26 followers.

I published there because over the long-term, I do want to grow my publication. One of the main benefits of doing so is the “Letters” feature that enables you to send emails to publication followers. That could be a great opportunity to convert readers into email subscribers or customers.

However, in order to grow my publication, the data says I will need to keep writing on other publications for the near future. I don’t have enough followers on my publication to make it productive to publish there yet.

Getting published is often as simple as reaching out to the editors of the publication. Publications include links to their contact information in the “About” box which can be found clicking “All stories” at the bottom of a publication’s homepage.

Key Takeaway #1: Keep writing for big publications. Starting a publication from scratch will take time.

2. Give yourself more chances to succeed.

This month I published one of my best performing stories ever (in terms of views within the first week of publishing). It was on a topic that is very different from what I normally write about, and what I thought my followers would be interested in.

So what happened? How did this story gain over 2.5k views within a week of publishing?

Two things stood out:

• Social shares lead to over 1k views.
• I published on a publication with over 73k followers.

The publication page itself was the source of only 17 views. But because so many people follow it, they see it in their feeds when they’re browsing on Medium and then click to view it.

I was also fortunate that several people shared it on Facebook (more on social below). But my takeaway from this experience was that there’s some degree of chance to all this. You need the right engagements from the right people at the right time. Keep writing quality articles and promoting them and eventually you’re bound to win.

Here’s another illustration of the degree of chance. This time a failure. I spent countless hours over the course of a few months researching and writing a story that’s only been viewed 157 times.

Key Takeaway #2: There is some degree of chance to success on Medium. Publish great stories regularly to increase your chances of success.

3. Maximize views from social shares.

I was fortunate to get several big social shares this month. In addition to my story described above that received over 1k views from Facebook, one of my old stories got shared by a very big page: Amazon. The Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing Facebook page has 171,153 likes. Here’s what that did after two days:

While I know social can be a great channel for attracting readers, I’m not sure how I can make it a repeatable strategy. It was mostly out of control.

Nonetheless, I will make continued effort to network with other social marketers. There are also two factors that are important for ensuring the impressions you get on social media actually convert into views of your story:

• An engaging title.
• A great image.

With an engaging title and a great image, you increase the probability that when someone sees your story in their social feeds, that they actually click on it and view your story.

Key Takeaway #3: Write great articles with great tiles and images and network with influencers to increase your social shares and the views you get from them.

4. Reddit is not working for me — but it can work.

It’s critical to get a high volume of views and recommends shortly after publishing. It signals to the Medium algorithm that readers like your story and therefore that they should be promoting it across the platform.

Social is one option. Reddit is another.

One of my fellow Medium writer friends gained over 18k views from Reddit in one day.

So I posted each of the five stories I wrote this month in one or more subreddits. But in the end, I’m not sure I earned even a single view from it!

I still can’t figure out Reddit. I think there’s opportunity there so I’ll need to learn more about it. My friend recommended taking time to find the right subreddit and adding a sincere message to the post. There are also topic specific content aggregation sites, like Hacker News and Inbound.org, that can help drive traffic.

Key Takeaway #4: Find a repeatable strategy for gaining early views from OUTSIDE of Medium.

Here’s what my strategy will be going forward based on this month’s results:

• Publish great stories more frequently. Ideally twice per week.
• Write for big publications once every 2–3 stories to reach new and bigger audiences and gain more followers.
• Promote each story outside of Medium immediately after publishing.
• Network more with people with large social followings and find other channels for promotion.

Here’s what I’d like to learn and work on next:

• Using Reddit to get massive amounts of views after publishing.
• Becoming a writer for a few more big publications.
• Getting more followers so that every time I publish, more people are notified.

Looking at my Stats dashboard, it feels like the momentum from the month is maintaining. I’m continuing to gain more followers, recommends and highlights, even though I haven’t published in about a week. I’m looking forward to seeing how August goes!