Week Two

Followers Matter a Lot on Medium

Lessons from week two of trying to grow a brand new account

I just wrapped up week two of Project Does Medium Still Work For New Writers. In week two, I earned $17.50. My paycheck for month one, which included week one’s five cents, was $17.55.

The goal is to see if I can get to where I’m earning $1000 a month in 90 days.

Not a part-time income. Yet.

My biggest takeaway, after two weeks, has been a huge increase in appreciation for the tenacity and persistence it takes to start from scratch around here.

I’d forgotten — it has been decades since I was a brand spanking new writer. I never was a really new writer on Medium because I brought readers with me when I came here.

Having a stats page that looks like this:

That’s never happened to me before. And it has been humbling.

It has made me understand what it takes to actually show up to work, even on days when the readers aren’t there. (The stats screenshot above represents about three days, where Medium didn’t curate my posts. How rude of them!)

I’ve been saying that it’s important, of course. Over and over.

But it’s easy for me to say that. I have readers.

I’m putting my money where my mouth is these days, and the only way to go from no readers to readers is to keep writing through the dry spells. But man, it’s hard. It’s so hard.

Poor Shannon Ashley. She’s the one I whine to when no one’s reading my posts. Or especially when Medium isn’t curating me. Why doesn’t anyone love me, Shannon?

There are better days, though. Here’s a screenshot from the four days before my little dry spell, when my posts were curated.

Better. Whew.

My screenshots might be a little hard to read because I’m not showing you titles. I don’t want to screw up my experiment by sending you to my posts.

What you can’t see is that some of those stats are for ‘letters’ that I sent to my publication followers. Most of the ‘0’ stats indicate letters, not posts.

Here’s What My Week Two Stats Page Looks Like for Views

And for fans

What you’re seeing there is that on days where my post is curated, I get more views and fans. On days where my post is not, I get far fewer views and fans.

I had three days in a row this week where my posts weren’t curated, and that sucked. A ton. One of those posts, I copied and pasted into a new story, deleted the old version, revised heavily, and reposted. It was curated finally and started to get a little traction yesterday.

Here are my stats at the end of week one, for comparison:

Some exponential growth. Week two is more than double week one, but not spectacularly more. I’m starting to see the benefit of having more followers, though.

The takeaway here is that if your goal is to get the most out of Medium — which means getting Medium to share your post with its readers, which in turn earns you a paycheck — you need to constantly work toward curation. And you need at least some followers.

I had 18 followers last week. I have 53 this week.

My publication had 28 followers last week. It has 52 this week.

My email list had 36 subscribers last week and it has 43 this week.

What I Did This Week

In case you want to play along, here’s what I did. It’s a good beginning for anyone just starting out.

• I wrote seven posts (four of them were curated).
• I sent out a newsletter to my email followers on Sunday.
• I sent a letter to my Medium publication followers for every post. The letters were an excerpt of the post with a button inviting them to come finish reading the post.
• I shared my posts on my personal Facebook and Twitter feeds.
• I followed one person every day and read and responded to at least one of their posts. (I’d meant to do three a day, but just couldn’t).

What I Learned This Week and My Plans for Next Week

Having followers matters a lot. I learned that last week, but it’s becoming more and more obvious. Followers means that Medium has someone to share my posts with.

I’d meant to try to get into someone else’s publication this past week, but I changed my mind. I decided that it’s more important to build up my own publication. I couldn’t make myself give that up by putting one of my posts somewhere else.

One weird little thing is that in my quest to keep this new account secret, I’m not letting myself connect with the followers I do have. I’m afraid of drawing in the people I know because I don’t want to screw up the experiment.

If I can’t find a way to stop that, I’m going to screw up this experiment anyway.

I think this week, I’m going to seek out a couple of relevant Facebook groups to join, and I’ll start sharing my links there if they have self-promo days.

I’m also going to work on an opt-in giveaway for my email list. It didn’t grow much this week.

In the next week, I’d like to try to come up with some kind of a series to write. Maybe something that could become the basis of a book in the future. I had an email from James Altucher this week about writing 101 books, and that got me thinking (you should absolutely be on his email list if you’re not already).

See you next Friday with another update!