Improve Your Numbers on Medium

Lessons learned from my experience writing on Medium over the past eight months

Becoming a part of Medium has been a great experience for me as it has led me to view writing in different ways. Some of this has come about through necessity, which I am finding can be a great motivator to doing things differently. The bottom line is, I need to earn enough money to live off of and for now I have chosen to do it through my writing. Period.

While I’ve been writing in one capacity or another for what seems most of my life, I now have finally accepted that I have to now view it as a business, not a hobby. This has led to changing my assessment of my writing, as well as what I want my writing to be. It’s no longer enough to just write whatever I want and ignore all advice for gaining readers.

While some may say this is a copout and you should only write from your passion and when you do you’ll naturally draw in readers, I don’t agree. Different people write for different reasons and when you are focusing on writing as a business, you can’t afford to just do whatever you want and assume you’ll get paid for it any more than you could in any other job or business. If you want to earn money with your writing you have to determine what will gain you a strong enough readership to do so.

Writing Regularly

Okay, I know, this topic has been done to death. Bear with me for just a minute though as it bears repeating. While “regularly” doesn’t necessarily need to be every day, you need to publish at least often enough to maintain a constant presence online.

The old adage out of sight out of mind could have been created for online writing. There was a recent thread on one of the Medium Facebook groups written by people who hadn’t posted in a while and the negative impact this had on their following. A lot of people weighed in and it became clear that going a full week without posting was long enough for it to seem like starting all over again. Writers who were in this camp were distressed and upset over their stats dropping precariously and some used the term “bottomed out” for stats and earnings. At least one of the writer’s posting said they were considering leaving Medium all together.

While I’m not one to say you must publish at least once a day, these responses show the importance of posting regularly enough to remain in the public eye. There are just too many writer’s online now, so if you don’t have an article available for your followers to read, someone else will. While they may forgive you for a day or two without posting, they aren’t likely to forgive much more than that.

I am not certain as to the number of posts per week that are ideal. That’s something you’ll have to discover for yourself. As far as my stats are concerned, I think the bare minimum for maining the progress I’ve made is four new posts a week, with five being the minimum for adding followers and fans.

I think if you slack off slightly one week, you really need to pick up the pace the week after. While I’ve noticed that upward momentum keeps my engagement high when I publish almost daily, I’ve also noticed when I’m not publishing as much that there is similarly downward momentum that continues for a bit even after I increase my rate of posting.

While I currently have a strong following of readers that respond to my work when I post, it seems that they are also quick to fall off on days when I don’t post. A new post gets me views and fans not just for that article but also for older posts, translating into new fans and follows. The large difference in numbers on days I don’t post makes a difficult writing day even harder.

Connect — Don’t Just Clap, Like or Follow

I’ve mentioned before the need for writers now to do far more than write. We are responsible for marketing our own work and even popular writers need to self promote to a certain extent to gain a following.

There are a number of Facebook promotion groups for different types of writing such as blogging or fiction writing and specific groups for individual platforms such as Medium. I have noticed on the ones I have become involved in, that there are regular posters who make a point of starting and responding to discussions and questions and reading and commenting on other writers’ articles. Then there are those whose name I only see when they drop a link as they never seem to engage with other writers on the platform nor do they support other writers’ articles.

Those who are involved in the community know who is who. It’s not enough to drop a link a disappear as writers will not bother reading your work. At the same time it’s also not enough to just go through and clap, like or share people’s work without ever reading it. This might get you a few extra views but they aren’t likely to be of value.

It’s nice to get notifications saying people clapped for one of my articles. However, it’s far better to see that they highlighted, commented and clapped for one of my articles. I also make a point of going through my notifications to see who responded to one of my articles so I can do the same for one of theirs.

While many writers seem to think that just clapping for a bunch of articles will get them a lot of support in return, it really doesn’t work this way. You need to establish relationships to gain actual followers and fans. We need to truly engage, with stories, with writers and with ourselves.

Find Your Voice

I have been on Medium about eight months now and am still working on finding my voice. I have been in academia for what seems like most of my life and am well versed in academic writing. However, I’ve always been reticent to write using a familiar or personal tone. In part, this is due to it being trained out of me in graduate school. On the other hand, though, I think this is now largely due to general discomfort over putting myself out there. Some of it also is a function of not having the knowledge or skills to know exactly what readers want to read and how best to communicate that content.

Academic writing has a discrete set of rules and a structure that can be learned. Writing from a personal perspective can be done in numerous ways. Finding your voice within your writing and determining what subjects you can write on best is a matter of experimenting. I’m just beginning to find this balance.

What Am I Trying to Do Differently?

In addition to trying to find my voice, increasing my publishing rate, marketing my work and trying to monitor which articles are the most popular and what might make them popular, there are a couple of other things I’ve started focusing on. These are aimed at getting and keeping my readers attention so they are more likely to read to the end of a post.

Titles — I have been taking more care with my titles as the title and subtitle are the first things you reader reads. I’ve been looking through popular articles both on and off Medium to see what kinds of titles they have and using them as examples for my own. Autocomplete has also been useful for creating titles for articles I’m working on. I may search for the topic I am writing about and see what comes up as the snippet and the top results, and what the titles of those articles are.

Popular, eye catching, engaging titles are those that use emotional keywords. I may also use a headline analyzer to determine whether the title I’ve chosen is the most effective one for that article. I’ve created a list of emotional words that I can incorporate into my titles to make them more engaging.

Structuring Essays

I was trained in academic writing to move from the general to the specific, to build a case for what I was going to say before saying it. When writing on the internet, especially on a platform like Medium which has multiple article on practically any topic you can think of, it’s important to get your readers’ attention immediately.

I’ve realized in order to do this, I need to start with something original, creative, funny or otherwise attention grabbing. I am going to try not to include general introductions or long winded passages presenting a justification for what I’m going to say before the fact. I’m going to try to just say it from my point of view or present my argument up front without summarizing what is already generally known.

Take Away

If you want to improve your stats and earnings on Medium the only way to really manage this is experimenting with your writing. This includes discovering your ideal publishing schedule, your voice and areas of focus. Working on ways to get your readers attention and maintain it are other things you’ll need to find ways of doing. Connecting with other writers and supporting their work will not just gain you additional support for your own writing but will allow you to form meaningful and lasting relationships with others in the field.

Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had short stories published in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others. Her poetry has been featured in several anthologies. She is the Managing Editor for novellas and serials at LVP Publications.

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This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +442,678 people.

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