How You Can Start Writing On Medium
And how to get 1,000 followers in less than 3 months.
There are bloggers out there that say getting 1,000 followers on Medium is extremely hard.
They tell you lies about Medium being overcrowded, and too competitive. They say things like, “You’ve missed the boat,” and that “Medium doesn’t work anymore for new authors.”
Nonsense. Bullshit. Govno! (‘shit’ in Russian).
Up until October 2019, I didn’t even have a Medium account. I was blogging for five years, that’s true — but it was in Russian. I had 0 presence in the English online community (although I did try to set up a Wordpress blog a few years earlier).
At that time, I was going through a rough time switching countries and relocating to London, and I was looking for a new job. I just quit my business; I was desperate and broke.
I needed something to save me.
And then, I remembered that I actually wanted to become an international author someday. I knew English, alright — I spent half of my childhood in the United States, and I went to college there. Becoming an author was my dream. But for some reason, I still couldn’t get myself to start writing in English.
That October, I decided that I had nothing to lose. Nobody wanted to hire me in London, so even if Medium didn’t pay me, I could at least enjoy the process of writing and getting my ideas out there. I decided to give it a go and see what happens.
I told myself that it’s an experiment and that I would use the 6-month-rule, and on October 2, 2019, I started writing.
I was still broke, but I now had a blog.
I wrote my first piece and hit ‘publish.’ It was an honest piece about the mistakes I’ve made in my video production business, and I gave some advice to people who want to pursue a similar path. I’ve seen other writers be vulnerable, and I decided it’s a good tactic (not always). I put a lot of sweat into that post.
The sad truth is, nobody read it.
I felt sad for a while but eventually decided that the best response would be to just continue writing. After all, it’s an experiment (and as any scientist would tell you, experiments allow you to fail).
After a week of daily publishing into the void (I had 20 people now following me from my Facebook account), I got my first view. Horraaaay! — “where there’s one view, there’ll be 100 views”, I said to myself.
Deep inside, I knew that I had to get learning if I wanted to make this Medium thing work.
So that’s what I started doing.
Every morning, I would wake up and write.
Then I would spend an hour or so researching other writers, seeing what they post and how they do it. I learned about a thing called “Publications,” and that publishing there gives you exposure. I then learned about how to get into those publications and searched for the top ones.
I’ve read some authors talk about his writing routine on Medium– it was exactly 1 hour (60 minutes) long.
He said he spent:
- 15 minutes researching and coming up with an idea
- 15 minutes writing
- 15 minutes editing
- And another 15 minutes responding to other writers’ work as a way to network
I thought it a bit too weird but gave it a try.
I then saw variations of this routine in other articles, and eventually decided to stick with my own way of writing.
In November, I wrote a 10-minute piece (roughly 2000 words) about how I used Jim Collins’ tracking method to learn about myself and ‘hack’ my happiness. I didn’t know whether it would fit the Medium community but decided to try sending it to a publication called Better Humans, as an experiment.
After seven days, I still didn’t get a reply, so I forgot about it.
The editor wrote an email to me, saying that he liked my idea and wants to publish it.
To say I was surprised would be an understatement.
I was on vacation in France that day, and I remember telling my girlfriend, ‘Holy shit. I just got paid for my writing. Is this really happening?!’.
That piece eventually got more than 4K claps. It was my second month writing on Medium. You can read it on my Medium blog, the post is called ‘I Found My Passion Using Jim Collins Tracking Method’.
After that article, I slowly started to amass a following. The commissioned piece didn’t earn me anything besides the $500 (a part of our contract was that it wasn’t part of the paywall), but it got me an additional 200–300 followers. It was a start.
After that success, I doubled down on my writing and wrote for 2–3 hours per day.
Eventually, in early January, right after New Year’s, I reached 1K followers. I exhaled.
Today, I am making about $500-$700 per month from Medium — not counting the commissioned pieces.
Is that a lot? Not at all.
I am a beginning Medium writer, and there are people out there making $100–200K per year from Medium alone. There are people who make even more.
Do I care? I do. But I am still not writing for the money.
I believe that in order to teach somebody — you don’t have to have it all figured out. You don’t have to be Tony Robbins, and you don’t have to have a million followers. All you need to do is to be one step ahead.
The truth is, getting your first 1,000 followers is not impossible. It’s actually pretty easy.
I never took a course on blogging in my life (and never will). I don’t believe that anyone should charge for this knowledge, so I don’t recommend you taking any Medium courses either.
A few days ago, I released my first eBook on Amazon.
It’s free for 3 more days, you can go and check it out here. (In case you do, I would love to hear your feedback in the review section on Amazon!)
It’s my first book out of twelve that I promised to write this year.
It’s also a short read: it can be read in under 50 minutes. It became #1 in Social Media, #5 in Blogging (Kindle Store) and went up from being #147,203 in the whole Kindle store to #5,290 in just 2 days.
The book is divided into two key sections:
1. Clouds — the high-level stuff. It’s where I talk about the psychology behind blogging, writing, and how you should adjust your mindset to reach 1K, 5K, 10K, and more followers — as well as how to make your writing stand out.
2. Dirt — the low-level, practical stuff. It’s where I’ll give concrete advice, tips, and hacks that I use myself to get curated, get more reach, and grow my following.
I tried to put together everything I know into something you can read, and, hopefully, build yourself a part-time (and then full-time!) income doing something you love.
It’s really not that hard. And I hope my eBook will be your first important step on this journey.
Disclaimer, though: this book doesn’t have any ‘new ideas’, that you can’t find elsewhere. I am not a guru, not a genius, nor am I trying to be.
All I am doing is packaging ideas from my experience, or from other people — in a way that can resonate with you and (hopefully!) make you a better human.
I wish you all the best.
