Everything You Need to Know About Gaining New Followers to Grow Your Audience and Increase Your Reach
Followers as just a number don’t mean anything and often won’t increase your regular readership.
You’ve worked hard on your writing skills, researched how to write high quality articles, taken the time to fashion well crafted, skillful content and you’ve started publishing on Medium. You don’t expect miracles right away, but after several months you don’t seem to be getting a lot of reads. Six months go by and still aren’t getting any traction.
Then, one month your numbers jump. Finally, you think, expecting that you’ve reached the turning point and your reads, and associated income, will continue to climb month after month. But the next month your numbers drop to their lowest yet. As time goes on, there’s no predicting how your content will do from month to month. Sometimes you do okay, other times you don’t. You have to write constantly and publish at least once a day, and sometimes more, just to make a couple hundred dollars.
This wasn’t what you thought becoming a full time writer would be like. You’d seen posts from other writers about passive income, the ability to count on earning a certain amount regularly from content you’ve already published. You’d learned to write evergreen content and maybe all of your posts weren’t completely evergreen but at least one in ten were. You become discouraged and consider giving up on the idea of being a writer.
There are a lot of writers out there who have experienced this situation on and off Medium. They aren’t lazy, they aren’t ignorant of good writing practices, they don’t expect to make a mint the first month. But they do believe that if they publish quality content consistently that over time, they’ll make a full time income. It’s disappointing when we put in the work month in and month out but we don’t see the benefits that we believe such effort warrants.
Although some people make fun of all how to succeed on Medium posts, there are actually quite a few that provide great information from people who have actually made the platform work for them. For example, Ayodeji Awosika, traceybyfire, Tonja Vallin and Nico Ryan provide info about some basics, Tim Denning writes about marketing your work, Robert Turner and Shaunta Grimes discuss how to self promote for success Medium, and Jason Deane takes a different approach, writing about how not to succeed on Medium.
All of this really useful information for becoming a successful writer and for writing on Medium specifically. However, I think one of the most important things in having your work read regularly has to do with followers.
How Important Are Followers Anyway?
Before considering what you can do to increase the number of followers you have, it’s important to consider what this number means. The number of followers you have reflects the number of people who have clicked the follow button on your profile page or one of your articles. This doesn’t mean that they engage with your content regularly, and it doesn’t even mean that they read that article through.
People follow others for all kinds of reasons. Some do it in a “follow for follow” agreement, some feel that they should follow everyone who follows them, some do it because people ask them to, some because they think if they follow a ton of people those people will follow them back and some do it because they read the beginning of an article they liked and so they clicked the follow button. Most people follow a relatively large number of others but actually read the content of relatively few of these writers. Even when a follower is genuine, meaning the followed you because they liked what they saw, this doesn’t mean they will be reading all or even most of your content regularly.
The importance that people place on the number of followers they have is majorly overvalued. I won’t say that numbers don’t matter, but numbers alone don’t matter and the value everyone places on these numbers needs to be reconsidered. I think there is too much influence placed on how many followers people have rather than the depth of those interactions which I believe is far more important.
Look at Follows as Potential Relationships
I think this is something that we frequently fail to do. It is also why I think that who we follow is a far more important list than who follows us. If followers are going to help us achieve writing success, expand our reach and increase our earnings, we have to have some kind of relationship with them. Rarely, this can just be accomplished through our writing but most often it occurs because of the connection we form with that follower.
It’s easy to just click a follow button. Reading content carefully enough to generate comments, sharing someone elses story with a note as to why others want to read it, and carrying on a conversation all take time and effort. In today’s hectic world, we are reluctant to take extra time away from what we are doing to help other writers achieve success with their work unless there is a connection.
When we have a long list of followers, we are reluctant to go through them one by one and find ways to content them. It’s always nice to see that we have a large number of followers, but these people may not be the most likely to actually read what we write.
A better way of maximizing the effect of followers on our success is to focus on those we choose to follow and how we choose them. When we choose who we follow carefully such that we have a concrete reason for hitting the follow button, we stand a better chance of establishing a relationship with them which will benefit both of us.
Choosing Who to Follow
Following someone should mean that you are familiar with what they write and want to make sure you are made aware when they have something else that comes out. You don’t have to like everything they’ve written but you should be familiar with what they write about and their writing style enough to know that you enjoy their writing. When we determine who we follow in this manner, we are more likely to enjoy what they publish and want to let them know it through comments, claps, highlights, bookmarks and shares.
Along with following people whose work you enjoy, also keep an eye out for those whose opinions you respect, or who write personal stories you can relate to. These folks are those who you will likely develop deeper connections to, maybe even making the conversation more private by using private messaging services to communicate. These are also the people most likely to not just follow you as well but also regularly read and engage with what you write.
Always Look For New People to Follow
Taking the approach I mention above is a good way to find writers you can establish meaningful relationships with who will also support your writing endeavors. Yet sometimes, we feel that we have more than enough to read each day, and so we don’t go out of our way to look for other writers whose work we might enjoy. Doing this can prevent us from growing our audience by limiting it mostly to the writers in our follow lists.
I spend an hour each morning reading across Medium as I try to find one new writer a day that I want to add to my follow list. I don’t always succeed at this, which is a good thing or my list of those I follow would be enormous. But I’d say 2–3 times a week, I identify someone whose writing I really admire,
But sometimes you may read a fabulous article which is not characteristic of that writer. When I come across an article I really like, I don’t click the follow button right away. Instead, I first go to their profile, and review the articles they have written over the past month or so. I look to see if they publish fairly regularly. It’s not that I won’t follow someone who doesn’t publish every day, but if they only publish once a month or less, I may decide not to follow them, unless the majority of their content is of interest to me.
If there seems to be a lot of content I want to read, I’ll read at least two more articles of theirs to get a better feel for who they are and how they write, and look for those I would likely want to comment on. Only then, will I click the follow button.
Once I follow a new writer, I go to their most recent piece, and write a private note introducing myself and telling them how much I enjoy their writing.
Keep Up With Those You Follow
It’s important to not just view the follow button as an end but as a beginning. The way to get followers to become actual fans is to maintain a relationship with them. We are more likely to enjoy reading the work of those who we like and who we interact with. So keeping up the connection by leaving public comments and otherwise engaging with their content as well as checking in every so often privately to say hi and see what’s happening with them will make them more likely to want to read and support your work.
Remember to also engage with those on your follow lists outside of Medium through Facebook groups and other social media, their website or outside blog, their efforts to promote other endeavors that are important to them. Share their links and let them know when you do so. The more you engage with them on and off Medium, the stronger support you can become for each other.
Take Away
Instead of focusing on how many followers you have, focus on who you follow. Establishing relationships with other writers whose work you enjoy reading is the best way to grow your audience, widen your reach and increase your earnings. Remember that gaining support for your writing is never a one way street and the more connected you are to others the more willing they will be to read your work, engage with and share it thereby establish greater reach and wider appeal.
Natalie Frank has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and often writes about how to create a more satisfying and successful writing life. She is an editor for The Partnered Pen, One1Infinity & One Table, One World and is Editor in Chief for Promposity & Mental Gecko, both of which she created. She is also the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications. Her collection of poetry, Disguised I Breathe, In Love I Hold, can be found on Amazon under her pen name, Taye Carrol.
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