4 Reasons Why I Got 20,000+ Views on My First Medium Post

Try these tactics and see if they work for you

In mid-2019, I posted my first article on Medium and ambitiously hoped to get 1,000 views in 30 days. In fact, I planned to write up to ten posts a month on that topic alone.

When I saw 1,399 views on the first day — my whole perspective on Medium and writing online changed forever.

Before I wrote my post, I hit the platform and researched successful articles. I determined what made a post successful by comparing popular articles and finding commonalities.

In hindsight, I’ve discovered the four reasons why my post got more than 20,000 views and these are strategies you can use too.

1. Go Against Popular Opinion

If you can disprove a popular belief or opinion — a lot of conventional wisdom turns out to be wrong in this day and age — you’re likely to get a lot of views.

In my case, I was proving that coders with little experience could create a commercial-ready face verification system in under an hour.

This became a popular opinion after I published my article. It was actually a strategic guess at first because face recognition was so new.

However, what I did know is that people (including myself) thought face recognition was really high tech and sci-fi. If we thought this, wouldn’t we also think that it would be difficult to implement?

2. Write For Your Audience

Audiences will appreciate your post if your writing style suits their way of reading. To find out what style of writing to use, look at successful posts in the same subject area.

It’s a major advantage when you are your audience. My post was directed at web coders, so it was important to get straight to the point.

Aware that successful Udemy coding courses have an average lesson time of five minutes, I intentionally divided sections of my post into a burst-reading format.

3. Write About What’s Trending

SEO. If you can write an engaging post about something that’s trending, you’re bound to views from outside of Medium. It just makes sense.

Depending on the trend and saturation of the subject matter, you may have to do things differently. The best way to get noticed is to use your headline as your primary line of attack.

The 80/20 rule is mostly why. It describes how 8/10 people will read your headline and 2/10 will be the ones that read your post.

With little to no saturation, you can easily get away with a casual headline. That’s only when timing is on your side.

4. Use a Celebrity

Basing a useful post around someone trending should help increase engagement — especially if they’re the featured image.

For my post, I used The Rock. My post ended with face verification results comparing The Rock a decade ago with him today.

My initial idea was to find two celebrities that looked similar but I was lucky to find a photoshopped image of The Rock engaging with another version of himself.

Research and psychology. They’re at the heart of the four reasons why my article got more than 20,000 views. Keep this in mind when writing.

Value. The main reason for writing on this platform.

Consider looking at top publications and the type of content they host. Find the posts that have done really well and start comparing those posts till you get aha moments.

Making this a habit will only bring you closer to getting more views than you expected.

Here’s to your success.