Stop Hating on Follow for Follow
And get busy with Help for Help.
It seems that one of the favorite pastimes on Medium is coming up with ideas and methods on how to succeed as a writer, and how to get more views, followers, and reads.
But there is no method that gets as much hate as ‘follow for follow’ does.
What is ‘follow for follow’? As the name says, you follow somebody and they follow you back with the sole purpose of having more followers.
The detractors are concerned with one main aspect of the method: its superficiality.
They say that it’s vain, it doesn’t get you any reads, and it floods your feed with a lot of articles you are not interested in anyway.
That might very well be. But Medium demands having 100 followers to have your stories monetized. If you don’t start with ‘follow for follow’, chances are slim to get the first 100 people to start following you.
No matter how good you are at writing, if no one is following you, you are literally talking to yourself because no one sees your text. Nobody gets to marvel at the awesomeness of your writing if they don’t follow you, do they? There is a chance to get curated but that chance is as slim as being discovered in a karaoke bar and taken to Sony’s recording studios.
It happens, but it’s rare.
We were raised to believe that if we are good at what we do, we’ll get discovered and make money and everything will be great. Let me burst that bubble right now: that’s not how this world works.
If it did, those incredible singers that you only hear in the church choir or singing to themselves in the shower would be on a grand stage somewhere.
But what do you see on stage? Weak voices with big asses.
People who’ve got game. Who played their cards right and now they’re on top.
Are some of them good at what they do? Certainly. But it wouldn’t have been enough. It takes a lot more than being good at something and sadly sometimes being good is not even involved.
Am I advertising you shouldn’t be good and only rely on tips and tricks? Definitely not! But being good doesn’t happen overnight. It takes work and patience, and while you’re doing that it’s better to have an audience.
Maybe ‘follow for follow’ doesn’t work in the long run, but it does work in the short run.
It helps with views, it helps with your self-esteem and it keeps you going.
Get those followers!
Don’t listen to the haters and the holier-than-though. If you feel it helps you to have followers, go for it.
You can take even take it one step further a ‘read for read’ and ‘engage for engage’.
What’s wrong with that? Aren’t you reading articles anyway? Why wouldn’t you engage, clap, and highlight? Why wouldn’t you help your fellow writers? And if you do, they will too. It’s a community.
It’s help for help.
Sound better now?
Do you feel you’re better than ‘follow for follow’? No problem, then don’t do it. Take your time, you’ll get there at some point. ‘Follow for follow’ is for people who want to speed up their progress and who would also like to be read. Seen. Heard.
If it’s not for you, don’t judge the people who take it one step further. Choose your path and they will choose theirs.
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