How I Gained 1000 Followers My First Month on Medium

And how you can too

I joined Medium at the end of August not really knowing much about the partner program. I love reading and wanted a new source of articles that were co-created from a live audience of those with first-hand experience. Medium seemed like the perfect place as well written articles were pushed to the top of the list instead of those with large advertisers backing them.

After learning how Medium worked, I thought I’d give writing a shot and join the partner program. I wrote a few articles without knowing good ways to promote my work, so the views and revenue were dismal. After learning how others built their audience and external ways to promote my writing, I dove in full fledge in October.

Views went way up, revenue quadrupled, more comments, likes, reads, everything improved. I see a lot of writers on Medium struggling to gain traction so below are the ways I found it best to do so.

1 — Follow Happy

Medium allows you to follow 125 people every 24 hours. You must max out your followers each day. Look to receive about 20–40 followers back each day from this technique. Of course, your following list will greatly outweigh your followers but that is ok because you can unfollow them all later on.

Focus on following accounts with the green ring around their profile picture. These are the accounts on the partner program which will generate revenue on your articles. It’s not bad to follow those without the green ring, it’s just that you won’t get paid unless they join within 30 days of reading your article under the new system.

2 — Follow within your Niche

You want to target people who enjoy the topics you write about. Target articles that are similar to yours and follow those who engaged with it. They are more likely to follow you because it fits their style. A good way to go about this is to check out the follower lists of publications in your niche. This will allow you to find thousands of people who like your topics and follow 125 of them every day.

3 — Engage with Others

It’s important to read and respond to other writers in your niche. People are more likely to check out your writing after they receive likes and comments from you. Even if it is just a sentence or two saying you enjoyed the article and love their style of writing. Those words will go a long way and make you stand out from others who just left a few likes.

Some people are fans of the like for like strategy. They basically would give every article 50 likes and hope to receive the same back from other readers. This can sometimes work but it dilutes how much your likes are worth. This does not matter now that Medium changed its format and your revenue only comes from reads and views. So, I advise being generous on your likes and supporting as many writers as you can.

4 — Write a lot

For beginners, it’s a good strategy to publish between 2 and 3 times per week. Only writing a few times per month won’t give you enough views to make a substantial amount of money. The top writers on Medium all post daily and sometimes even more than once per day.

2 to 3 times is a good start to find out what topics your readers like and then you can ramp up from there. The more you write, the more likely you are to get curated and have posts go viral.

Check out Medium’s guidelines to learn about curated posts and how to increase your chances. In the early stages, focus more on quantity over quality. As your progress as a writer, you will make the natural shift to quality over quantity.

5 — Publications

You should be submitting almost all your articles to the top publications in your niche. This will allow your stories to reach their entire network of followers. Getting into large publications such as The Startup will broadcast your stories to over 500,000 accounts.

This will drastically improve your followers and engagement. Keep reaching out and pitching to publications as it’s the best way to reach a large number of people. I recommend using the website Smedian and checking out the top 100 publications list.

Continually following these 5 tips will drive your writers’ profile forward. It can be a lot of work writing every day per week and trying to engage with as many accounts as possible. But you will see a dramatic increase in your stats and revenue which will motivate you to keep going. Feel free to drop in any recommendations that helped you grow your profile on Medium.

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