Creating Stories that Never Die

How to retain readership over time

Trending Today, Forgotten Tomorrow

When I first started writing on Medium, the stories I would write tended to have a very short lifespan. There would be an initial surge of interest when it was published only to drop off in viewership within a few days.

It wasn’t until I started writing myself that I realized this is a common phenomenon with all things written on the internet. Much of what is trending one day is quickly forgotten the next day only to be replaced by something more relevant and current. All that hard work and research you put into writing a story might feel like it’s wasted once you see that no one is no longer viewing it.

But does it have to be that way?

As I discussed in a previous story, there are things you can do to help keep your stories relevant, such as embedding them within new stories, which might help get some new views and fans that you wouldn’t have been able to pick up otherwise.

However, something happened with one of my stories recently that gave me an even better idea for ensuring the stories I write can have a long lifespan that far exceeds most other material we come across on the internet.

The Importance of External Views

One topic I like to write about is cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, an emerging field with lots of applications and plenty of growing interest from every stretch of the globe. I’ve found that there’s relatively little information out there regarding crypto projects beyond Bitcoin and so I’ve dedicated a few stories to discussing these lesser-known projects.

One of these stories was titled “Restart Energy and the MWAT Token”, which was focused on the company, Restart Energy, who is working on a decentralized energy trading platform using blockchain technology and a cryptocurrency, MWAT, to facilitate energy trading among other things essential to the platform.

Here are the latest viewership stats for this story:

Keep in mind that this was the sixth story I had posted since joining Medium and my following was virtually nonexistent. All the other prior stories I had written had pretty low viewership (well below 100 views) and these same stories still have much lower viewership in comparison to the Restart Energy story to this day.

So, why did this story fare so much better over time?

Perhaps, it was the fact that this one was curated?

Curation certainly helped, especially in the beginning as you can see from when the story was first distributed (i.e. curated), but almost all my previous stories were also curated, so that can’t be the answer.

Now, let’s look at how this story’s stats have changed over time. In the graph below, you can see that although a fair amount of views are still coming from Medium, the internal views are usually less than the external views.

Another thing to take note of is that the views have remained relatively consistent over time from when it was first published in April, rather than what happens with many stories where the views quickly drop to near zero.

To understand why the external views have remained so consistent and actually dominated the internal views at times, we have to look back at the viewership stats. If we focus on the top external referrals, Google is number three — and that number keeps growing.

If you Google either “MWAT” or “MWAT Token” right now, my story should show up on the first page of search results.

This is the key that is helping to drive consistent traffic to the story.

Naturally, anything that shows up on the first page of Google search results is going to be viewed, read, and shared (hence the high direct referrals) more than anything else that might be on those thousands of other pages of search results.

I’m certainly not the only one to benefit from having the spotlight in Google search results as Casey Botticello recently found out with one of his stories that has garnered over 100,000 views!

As he points out in his story, Medium already benefits from having high domain authority, which essentially means anything you publish on Medium will fare better in terms of external views than if you had published the same story on a new website you just created.

Although there are a number of ways to optimize your story to improve its SEO — and you can check out his story if you’d like to do that — I’d like to focus more on how I specifically got the Restart Energy story to the top of Google search results. And it’s actually very simple.

Finding Niche Topics

There is a TON of content on the internet, so the idea of finding “niche” topics to write about might sound ludicrous — but it’s not.

The first step is to think of everything you know about that you feel others aren’t as well educated on, a perspective that very few ever consider, or an innovative solution that hasn’t received as much attention as it should.

When I began writing about Restart Energy and their blockchain solution, I knew that it was a topic that very few knew about and that they were offering an innovative solution to a major problem.

Ideas that now seem mainstream weren’t always that way and only became mainstream thanks to people that were writing about and discussing these ideas that slowly caught on with the masses.

Imagine that you’re one of those visionary individuals who was writing about that topic long before it was popular, and now your work has helped lay the foundation for what is now considered mainstream.

This is why I firmly believe that the readership for the Restart Energy story and other crypto-related stories will actually increase over time rather than die out like so many others as the public becomes more aware of the technology and its implications.

Once you’ve found what you think is a niche topic, do some quick Google and social media searches to see how much content is already out there on it. If there’s a plethora of information on the topic but you still want to write about it, just keep in mind that you’ll be competing with all the other published work out there.

This might seem like counterintuitive advice, but the best niche topics will be those that aren’t trending. In certain instances, it makes a lot of sense to write about trending topics, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get to the top of the Google search results. In fact, you’ll probably get buried unless you find a way to stand out from the crowd.

Remember, what’s trending today is forgotten by tomorrow in our fast-paced digital age of information.

So, the best thing to do if you want to make it to the top of Google search results (besides optimizing SEO and writing a good quality article) is to find those topics that very few are talking about or perspectives that haven’t been shared, learn everything you can about them, determine what keywords people are using to search for that topic, and get to writing.

You may not see major results overnight, but in the long run, your story will most likely outlast the rest.

And who knows, your story might just be trending one day!

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