In December, I Had 9.4K Views (A 100% Increase From November). Here is How I Did It
This is a 3-minute article, and the juice is at the end
In December 2023 there were a lot of stories about “how to do this and that on Medium”. It seemed as if everybody had suddenly become an expert on Medium.
Because Medium isn’t fully transparent with how its algorithm works, it has left people confused. Everybody is trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. In this environment, anybody who has a vague taste of success thinks that they have solved The Da Vinci Code-type mystery or found the holy grail. And of course, sharing the secret of their success with us comes naturally. After all, nobody finds the holy grail and hides the good news.
Success on Medium comes in a lot of ways, but most people measure success in views, while others measure in earnings.
In 2023, my views grew at a steady and impressive pace. In January 2023, I had only 285 views. In November, 4700 people viewed my page.
However, it’s what happened between November and December that shocked me.
In one month, my views increased by 100%, from 4.7K to 9.4k.
Take a look at the picture below to see my views for December 2023.
I always expect my views to increase every month, as that’s one metric I use to measure growth. However, I was surprised when it increased by 100%. But I’m also faced with a dilemma. Of the 9.4k views I had in December, almost half (4.3K) came from only one article.
On December 19th, I published an article that I thought would be my last article for the year.
But I got bored pretty quickly, and I decided to make a short compilation of the most likely events that’ll occur in 2024. I titled this article Top Prediction for 2024 and published it on December 25th, 2023 and I went to sleep.
What I saw when I woke up surprised me.
It turns out that a lot of people all over the world want to know what events to expect in 2024, and Google was sending them to my article. Between 25th and 31st December, this article was viewed over 4.3K times, and read by 1.6K people. 96% of that traffic came from google.com.
I’m happy about all the views that Google.com brought to my story. But it also taught me an important lesson. It was a disappointing lesson, but important anyway.
Why was I disappointed?
Although this story had over 4.3K views and 1.6k reads, it earned less than $10. It turns out that all the views and reads are from people who aren’t paying members on Medium. So even if 10,000 non-paying members view and read my story, it doesn’t count much towards my earnings. What a pity.
Some good news came out of the experience though. Some of the smart people who viewed my story also jumped at the chance to subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It’s a newsletter focused on mental health, where I share weekly mental health tips based on my training as a medical doctor and a clinical psychologist. And it’s free.
You can join these smart people and subscribe to receive weekly mental health tips for free.
If you’ve read up to this point, thank you.
This month, I already have almost 1k views — just in 2 days. Let’s see what the rest of the month brings.
