How I Got Mentioned In An Article About Success On Medium
5 observations about my Medium stats
Recently, I received a notification that I was mentioned in an article by another writer for my success on Medium. This happened after the publication of my article titled “What I learned from Breaking 5000 views and 500 followers Milestone on the Same Day” which has become quite popular.
Before you roll your eyes on yet another Medium “success story,” let me say that this is not an article about shortcuts to achieving success because I, for one, am not aware of any. This is more about sharing what I’ve learned on my nearly 5 month journey on this platform which my readers find to be insightful (based on the enthusiastic responses for my previous such articles).
I’m not sure yet what I did to deserve the mention by that writer but thought it would be interesting to share my observations regarding my Medium stats which seems to be at the receiving end of more attention.
Below is the pic of my stats dashboard that I had posted in a previous article.
Between June 19 and July 2 when the pic below was taken, I had published three 4–5 minute articles and one short form article. These are the new stats.
This next pic shows more details about my stats page. It shows not only the views but the reads and fans for my stories.
Here’s a brief description from Medium to help explain this more clearly:
The bar graph represents overall traffic on all of your published stories and responses over the last thirty days.
Views: Number of visitors who clicked on a story’s page.
Reads: Number of visitors who have read the entire story.
Fans: Number of unique readers who clapped for this story.
5 Observations about it:
1.) What is the deal about read ratio?: Read ratio is the difference between views & reads. You can find the read ratio for each of your articles on your stat page.
Why are reads so important, you ask?
Here’s a snippet from an article by The Maverick Files which helps clearly explain this:
“According to Medium, member engagement in terms of reading time is the gold standard of engagement — a conclusion derived over many years of switching from claps to reads to views to read time. Member read time then translates into $ earnings and hence the metric.”
So what is a good read ratio?
Thomas Smith in his article for the StartUp describes a good Medium read ratio as between 20% and 50%.
I have published a little over 30 articles since I started in February and I’ve observed that my read ratio usually oscillates between 50% and 80%. The highest read ratio of 84% was for a short form article submitted to The Daily Cuppa. One could say that shorter articles perform better in terms of read ratio but in my experience, it varies.
2.) Non Viral articles: Some of you may be fortunate to have your articles go viral. Others may ask what it means to have an article go viral.
In her article, Sarene B. Arias elaborates on what it means to go viral on Medium “Depending on your reach, a story that skyrockets from 0 -1000 impressions in 24 hours can be considered as having “gone viral” but more often, viral Medium stories earn more than 20K impressions in a matter of weeks.”
Now, I can’t say views of my articles have crossed the thousand view mark.
So the question then is how do I get eyes on my non viral articles?
Sarene goes on to mention 4 keys in achieving this:
- building a base of true followers
- gaining acceptance to wide distribution publications
- building a personal distribution list
- social media following
In case you are wondering, I don’t vigorously promote my articles outside of Medium and rely mainly on internal traffic or traffic within Medium for my views & reads. If you belong to the MPP, then you might also know that member reads are where your earnings come from.
3.) Reads = $$$??
It does. Let me just say that I have come across quite a few articles about how to make money on Medium as I’m sure you have too. I have found that the advice offered is sometimes contradictory and the amounts that are claimed could be made is quite unrealistic at least from my experience.
I’m sure if you have a huge following who actively reads your work, semi viral/ viral articles or Medium bonuses then it would make a big difference in earnings.
This is an image provided by Casey Botticello in his article which provides statistics from September 2017 to March 2020. What caught my attention was the percentage of authors who earned $100+ over the years… sort of self explanatory I would say.
*If you have come across an updated version of these numbers, do share as I wasn’t able to find it.
Personally , I decided not to take the making $$ part too seriously. I focus more on finding topics I feel are interesting to write about from my perspective and interacting with fellow writers/readers.
4.)Niche up or down: I started out on this platform by writing about life experiences but along the way, I branched out into writing about mental health, self-awareness and my experiences as an empath. I would credit Diana C. and her wonderful publication Know Thyself Heal Thyself for inspiring me to venture out of my comfort zone with her weekend prompts. A person who I consider a friend & guide Vishnu*s Virtues has helped to encourage me to successfully attempt humor and articles about relationships. All this has helped my articles get wider exposure.
So, as a newbie, I would say that I enjoy the freedom to experiment with varied topics rather than restricting myself to a specific niche. I guess when I am more established as a writer, I would think about niching down but not anytime soon.
5.) Publications: I publish mostly in small to medium pubs because I enjoy the sense of community. I appreciate the fact that it is a big achievement as a writer to have articles published in renowned publications with massive followings. I would like to point out you can still get the views/reads/followers/Medium bonus by publishing with smaller ones too.
Perhaps the most important observation I have made is regarding the benefits of writing consistently. One of the best pieces of advice I have read and implemented is to be consistent with my writing. Ever since I started writing in Feb of this year, I have tried to set aside time to write every day even if it is just doing rewrites or edits and I have discovered that it has made a huge difference in the quality of my articles.
Thank you, Dr Mehmet Yildiz for your kind & prompt responses & thanks Dr. Preeti Singh for your encouragement.
