How to Build Your Medium Following From Scratch
This is how I got over 400 followers in my first month
Do you have a hard time building your following on Medium? Are your stories not getting the traction you want? Did you make less than $1 from the platform last month? Let’s change that!
Whether you are new to Medium, or an experienced writer who has been here for a long time, increasing your following is crucial to get your work read and to make some money from it.
Now, let me tell you that 400 followers are not going to make you economically independent. But it’s a great start. For example, in June (my first full month on Medium), I made $21,58, and the last week in May when I became a member, I made $4.61. Gaining a large follower count early in your Medium journey will lead to a bigger chance that your stories start trending, which will get them read more and lead to more followers. In this way, your following can hopefully begin to grow exponentially.
Before we start, I want to say that I used these strategies to build my following from 0. I didn’t have a single Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook follower to lean on. I didn’t have an email list or any previous related network. Thus, these are strategies that can be used by absolutely anybody.
So how do you grow your following on Medium? Let’s get straight into it.
Follow people who clap in your niche
We want followers who are interested in our writing and who engage with it. An engaging follower can turn into a loyal reader who will spend time and clap on several of our articles. But to get these people to follow us, we need to do two things.
- We need to find them
- And we need to make them see us
So how do we find people who could be interested in our writing? Simple, we look for people who engage with content similar to ours.
Start by searching for your niche in the search field. Let’s say we write about freelancing.
Now, click the tag “freelancing” and find an article that looks relevant to your writing, that has at least a few thousand claps.
This one is a good example:
Open the article and click on the number of claps to see who has clapped for the story.
So now you have a long list of people in front of you, who potentially would be interested in your content. Now we have to make them know we exist. How do we do it? We follow them.
This is important: Start following the people who have the green markings signifying that they are paying Medium members. Ignore the others. We want to attract followers who are not limited to three articles per month (we want them to read all of our stories, right?). We also prefer if their time on our content generates income.
You can follow up to 125 new people per day. You don’t have to go overboard and do it every day. Do it every once in a while, and once you have around 1k followers, you can stop. At that point, we have enough followers to make our stories generate a purely organic following.
By following these people, they get a notification, and hopefully, they will check out our profile. As we already know, these people are interested in freelancing. We can engage their interest with the spellbinding headlines of our articles.
Note that this is not a sustainable long-term approach to gain followers. As we start to build a following, we want to start looking towards other strategies.
Write valuable responses in new, trending stories
This strategy is essentially the same as what many writers do on Quora to build a following for their businesses. For example, Nicolas Cole got 30 million views (yes, 30,000,000) by responding to questions on Quora. And yeah, he has nearly 60k followers here on Medium.
Writing responses might not make us any direct money in the short run, but in the long haul, this will build our personal brand, and people will see us as an authority in our niche. My goal is for people to think, “I want to read about freelancing. I’ll go to Philip’s profile to see what he has written.”
New, trending articles are going to be seen by a lot of readers. These posts are usually written by prominent Medium writers who consistently get high views on their content. By providing valuable responses to these articles, we expose the readers to our material and writing ability, and hopefully, they engage with us, check out our profiles, and follow us.
To find trending articles, we do the same as we did in strategy #1. Enter, for example, “freelancing” in the search field, and choose the tag. This time, we want to click “archive” and go through the last few weeks to find a recent article which already has a lot of claps.
This post was published a few days ago and already has almost 900 claps. It’s not an unbelievable number, but it’s enough.
Now we want to engage with this post by adding a valuable response. By “valuable,” I don’t mean “Thank you for your article, I learned a lot.” Instead, we want to contribute to the lessons provided by the author. We do this by either adding our knowledge and experience or disagreeing in a constructive and detailed way.
To add to this article, we could contribute with our knowledge by writing what strategies you used to gain income during the pandemic, or share your experience of hardship and struggle — the more thorough the response, the better.
Mention big sharks — and tell them
If we don’t have a lot of followers that see our articles, we can try to make somebody else’s followers see them. To use this strategy, we need to plan articles where we can, relevantly, refer to work by well-known writers. For example, I wrote a story that helps aspiring freelance writers find the best educational sources for launching a freelance career.
In this article, I refer to video courses, books, and blogs created by some big names in the business. After publishing the story, I shared it on social media. On twitter, I mentioned several of the people whose work I had written about.
As a result, three of the people I had mentioned retweeted and commented on my tweet, and consequently, it was exposed to a total of 7,700 followers. That’s a vast difference from the 56 followers that all my other tweets reach.
As the people retweeting me are in the writing business, there is a high chance that many of their followers are Medium members and that they will follow me if they like the content. Also, if they are members of Medium and choose to follow me on Twitter, they are automatically added to my Medium followers. You just need to make sure that you have connected your Medium account to your Twitter.
Share your stories to Medium specific Facebook groups
In case you didn’t know, there are several Facebook groups dedicated explicitly to Medium. The admins from many of these groups post a daily thread where you may share your latest article.
Some groups I’m a member of:
- Medium Wizardry
- Medium Writers
- Medium Mastery
- Medium Writing
- Medium Dreamers
- Medium Writers Lounge
- Medium Magic
By sharing your articles, you expose them to people who are willing to read it, regardless of if it’s your first story or your follower count. Note that many of these threads will have between 50 and 150 comments, so you want to make your comment stand out. By this, I don’t mean that you should write in caps lock or go nuts on the emojis. But most people just paste their story link and hit send. To be seen, make sure you write something about your post over the link. Think of it as a subtitle, with the purpose to engage people and make them click your link.
Most people in these groups are looking to read and engage with other people’s content to build relationships and their audiences. You want to do the same; don’t just hit and run.
Which leads me to my next point.
Engage and build relationships
I consider this strategy the best long-term strategy to build an active following that engages with our content. We want people to read our stories, not just click and bounce. If people see a story from a familiar face, there is a higher chance that they will read it. Members we have built a relationship with will more likely spend time, highlighting, clapping, and responding to our content.
To build lasting relationships on Medium, we look for people (again, preferably in your niche) who have time to engage with us. Have you ever sent an email to an editor, responded to a Medium story with 60k claps, or mentioned a celebrity in a tweet — and not received a reply? Me too. That’s because they are swamped with comments, mentions, and emails. They simply don’t have time.
Instead, we want to look for regular Medium users like you or me. People who might be new to the platform and don’t have many followers, views, or responses. The less engagement we already have, the more time we have to engage with the people who write to us.
So in practice, how do we build relationships on Medium?
We spend time on Medium, every day, reading stories by people with a small following. We clap on them, highlight them, and most importantly, we write to the author. Respond to tell them if you enjoyed their article, what you liked, and maybe what you agreed or disagreed with. A paragraph or two is usually enough.
An incredible tip from Tom Kuegler is to write down who you respond to, so you can come back and engage with the same people several times. This way, you will slowly go from being a reader to a friend.
To find people to engage with, follow the steps of strategy #2. From here, read stories by authors’ who don’t have over 500–1k followers.
Publish consistently
We have all read about publishing consistently, so I’ll keep this one short.
When I started on Medium, I was traveling in Asia. I was quarantined on a tropical island in Thailand, trying to set up my career as a freelance writer.
After publishing my first two stories on Medium, I got dengue fever. As a result, I was completely knocked out and couldn’t post for almost two weeks.
During this time, I saw a massive decrease in views, reading time, and engagement in these articles. And people stopped following me.
To counter this, we need to publish often. Some say a couple of times a week; some say every day.
By publishing often, we increase the chance of people finding our content and following us. It usually only takes one good article for a new reader to follow you — make it count.
Summary
If we want to succeed on Medium, we need to build a following. There are no magic tricks or secret hacks to do this. It takes time and effort. But by putting the work in, we increase the chance that people find and engage with our content. The strategies discussed in this article to gain followers early in your Medium journey are to:
- Follow people who clap in your niche
- Provide valuable responses in trending posts
- Mention successful writers’ work in your content, and telling them about it
- Share your stories in Medium specific Facebook groups
- Engage with other Medium writers
- Publish consistently
If you enjoyed this article, please consider checking out some of my other work.
Philip Sundt has been a full-time traveler for over 2 years, has since then visited more than 12 countries, and realized that life on the road is possible — even for an average Joe. Philip covers travel, freelancing, and personal growth. Say hi on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook!
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