How to Gain 20 to 30 New Followers On Medium Every Day
And you don’t even have to go viral to do it
I get an interesting reaction every time someone asks me what I do for work these days — and it usually involves an unknowing shrug.
The sad fact is, most people haven’t heard about Medium, even if they may have read an article or two in the past.
The even odder part is when I encounter someone that has heard of it. It always leads to an interesting conversation. Not only that, they always seem impressed with my 3,200 followers.
Say that about any other platform and people wouldn’t bat an eye. But for some reason, Medium is incredibly difficult to gain a big following these days.
That is unless you’re an absolutely amazing writer like Sean Kernan (7,000 since October), Sinem Günel (7,600 since July). Both of these writers have gained an incredible following by writing incredible work, repeatedly. (Go check out their stuff, it’s great!)
That’s not what this article is about, though. I’m not a great writer, but I am trying to improve a bit every day. I haven’t gone viral, and yet I’ve attained a pretty decent following in 6 months.
This article is meant to show you how you can gain 20–30 new followers every day and get your articles more eyeballs.
How?
- 15 minutes every day
- A bit of grit and perseverance
- A fast internet connection
4. The feeling that more views of your work will lead to eventual success and improvement through feedback
What strategy?
It’s really quite simple but bear with me. About 90% of days I’ll sit down on my laptop or mobile and add the 150 other writers Medium allows us to.
It usually only takes 15 minutes at most, because of the following strategies I use. To date, I think I’ve added something upwards of 20,000 people on the platform.
Crazy, right? A little effort every day can really add up over time.
How to follow to gain followers
This simple strategy starts to get interesting when you look at all the minor functions of Medium that many people might not know about. I only found these by playing around and researching anything and everything about the platform for months.
Creating active publication lists like this really helped me get to know the ins and outs of publishing here.
This led me to my first area of adding followers.
You want people who will read your work (and that you might enjoy reading as well). By looking through publication lists like the above, you can find the magazines that match up with your own preferences.
Tip 1: You should be following people that match up with you well.
Strategy #1: Publication Writers & Editors
Do you like humor? Let’s use this as an example. Go to the following list and peruse through it.
There’s a bunch of the biggest and most active humor publications on this platform. Now you have access to not only all their wonderful work to enjoy, read, and learn from, but you can also see a massive amount of other users/writers on Medium.
Want to add all the authors on a publication? Just take the web title and add ‘/about’ to it.
Here’s my recent humor pub I created, called A Tinge of Cringe:
and its address: ‘https://medium.com/a-tinge-of-cringe’
If I wanted to see all the authors on it, I’d just type in ‘https://medium.com/a-tinge-of-cringe/about’
It takes you to a page where you can see my beautiful face drinking a Tiger beer.
I know that’s one of the reasons you might want to visit it, but more importantly, you can see who the editors and writers are on the platform.
If you look at a publication like The Startup, this can be in the hundreds.
And you can follow them all!
Tip 2: Go find publications that suit your niche, and start adding the writers and editors.
Who knows, maybe one of the editors will notice you and read some of your stuff too.
Strategy #2: Publication Latest Work and Followers
Another handy trick is adding ‘/latest’ to the end of one of the publications. This will show you all of the most recent articles published there in chronological order.
Not only that, but it shows you the contact information and how many subscribers the publication has.
Here’s the ‘https://medium.com/better-marketing/latest’ for Better Marketing, showing a very respectable 54,000 followers.
Medium isn’t the only way you can get in touch with writers and editors, if they display emails, Twitters, and Book faces, why not reach out to them there too?
This section is good to see what kind of styles the publications are into publishing lately. You can also try to see what seems to gain more traction or not and study those articles (and just enjoy a good read).
As for following, you’ll know if any articles are clapped for and are recently released, those clappers are active readers on the platform. So add them.
Tip 3: Check out the latest articles/writers in your niche’s big publications
Strategy #3: Publication Archives
This is one of the most effective tools for finding places to add followers. If you go on any publication and type ‘/archive’ at the end, you’ll come to a sortable page with all of their work.
For instance, if you wanted to see the most viral articles of Publishous in the last month, you could type ‘https://medium.com/publishous/archive/2020/03’ (or use their filters on the ‘/archive’ page.
There we would see a wonderful article on regrets in life by Ayodeji Awosika leading the pack with 3,500 claps.
If you’re interested in writing/reading about similar topics as this outstanding writer, it would be a good idea to start here. You can open up his article, read it, clap for it, and then see everyone else that’s clapped for it too.
I bet these people, like yourself, are also interested in this subject. So feel free to add.
Tip 4: Use the archives to find the best of the best, and big sources of people to follow
Note: I have noticed if there are huge amounts of claps on a particular story, a slow internet connection can slow the process down in this case.
Strategy #4: Popular Authors
Did you know you can also see who follows other people? And you can open that up and follow them as well?
This is a source of followers I’ll use if I have already exhausted my favorite publications lists of clappers/writers/editors. Believe me, after 20,000+ follows, that actually does become an issue, oddly enough.
If I was interested in writing about satirical political articles, I’d search for the best. But where to start? Well, remember that publication niche advice above?
Big authors almost always publish in big, related publications. Want to find some inspirational articles on better outlooks in life? You’ll find Thomas Oppong at Mind Cafe.
Looking for entrancing articles on all the facets of love (and a hell of a cool last name)? You’ll find Jessica Wildfire posting over at P.S. I Love You quite frequently.
The point is, these big publications have niches, and if one of those matches with yours, go there. You’ll find amazing authors for whom you can read and learn from. And a big audience of other fans in that niche — all of whom you can add over time.
Just go to their profile page, and click on the ‘followers’ section like this:
(Oh look, my Tiger Beer drinking face again, how pleasant.)
Tip 5: Follow the best to stand out from the rest
Strategy #5: Top writers
If you’re looking for even more authors that are posting a lot on a subject, find one of the 73 top writer tags that match what you’re looking for — and search for it.
What are the 73 top writer tags? Don’t worry, I spent a lot of time writing and listing those too.
Let’s say you’re interested in writing about cooking, one of the 73 tags. Just throw the word ‘cooking’ up into the Medium search bar and hit enter.
It’ll take you to a page with lots of articles listed, some publications, and more importantly, tags on the right-hand side.
Click the ‘Cooking’ tag, and it will take us to the Top Writer page for Cooking. And now we’ve opened up Medium’s pandora’s box.
We have the top stories (with thousands of claps and people for us to follow).
We have a full archive of all previous top stories (with multiples of thousands of claps and people to follow).
And we have all the current top writers (up to 50) with their massive follower base for us to follow.
With just this tip alone you should be able to find every big author on the platform that’s related to the niche you’re interested in — and their fan base alongside it.
Tip 6: Use ‘top writer’ tags to find a massive source of potential authors, writers, and most popular work on a topic
Takeaway
The above advice isn’t meant to make you a million dollars, but it is meant to give you a little headstart on growing a following on Medium.
Slowly and steadily.
But just like writing, if you can spend a little time every day adding people, you’ll probably spend some of that time reading, improving, and maybe even writing too.
Just remember to focus on your niches, look for similar potential audiences, and follow away to your heart's content. In a few months' time you’ll have a couple of thousand potential readers that you might not have before.
Good luck and happy writing!
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