The Best Ways to Create Followers on Medium
The gold standard for community creation, and how to do it.
Who you and I are in real life, or IRL as my younger friends would write, is how we show up on line. There is no “other” mantle that we suddenly become when we sit down to read or write or highlight here on Medium. So where you and I have the propensity to support, share, be inclusive in our everyday lives, that is what shows up here.
That said, you can also build the habit. Given quarantine, not a bad idea. This is safer.
Couple questions:
- Is your writing all about the money? I’m not your author. What I suggest will help, but if making money is the only thing you want out of Medium, first, don’t quit your day job. Second, don’t quit your day job. I’d say it again but I think you got it. Lots of people out there happy to pilfer your wallet so that they can, as a good friend of mine put it very succinctly the other day, “shove their dick into your mouth” about how to make money on Medium. And BTW, if frankness offends you, I’m not your author either. Cause honey, if those morons were making that much money on Medium why on earth are they on Medium? Elon Musk doesn’t have a How to Get Rich as Croesus workshop plan on here.
- If writing is a means by which you grow yourself, and by virtue of that organically and steadily grow a business along with yourself and others, I am your author. Not an expert, but I do have a useful take once in a while.
So. If you naturally and organically like to support and include, Medium is for you. Here’s how this works, based on what I do regularly. I do NOT discuss stuff I don’t do regularly:
READ. By this I mean read other authors’ stuff. You want people to read you, READ THEM.
HIGHLIGHT. Your highlights are gifts, just as those passages I take the time to highlight for you are gifts. This is the fundamental message of community collaboration. This is how we grow together, learn together, and teach each other what’s important. Highlights on your material are the direct conversation to YOU that a reader is telling you: this is meaningful, important, I like it, you made a typo, whatever. Highlights are teacher. You do not get a better insight into what your readers find important in your work than highlights. Same goes when you do that for others. Look for highlight trends. I find lots of things in common when Medium shows me other readers who highlight what I have highlighted on certain articles. HELLO! That’s someone whose material might interest you. Check them out. Read their stuff. Highlight it.
Highlights say: I see you. I hear you. This touched me moved me pissed me off whatever. We writers die without feedback. Highlights are feedback. Before this, we writers would kill for this kind of two-way conversation all day every day with our audiences. You want to grow as a writer? Highlight and read your highlights, then attend to the messaging. You want engagement?
Give it first.
COMMENT without being a dick about it. Comment to grow, uplift, expand. Comment to add value. READ your comments and respond without being a dick about it. And to that:
If a commenter-kindly not a troll- says something that gets your goat, sit that shit down right now. Back off. Look at what part of you just rose. Are you defensive? Angry? Offended? Why? Before you take out the acid to toss on someone, first look at whatever came up for YOU. Usually if I have this reaction, there was a modicum, maybe a lot, of truth in their words. This is when I get to ask:
- What on earth is THAT all about?
- What part of this might be true?
- If so, what does it say about me that I feel (angry, defensive, etc.)?
- What part of this comment is a gift?
Because that comment might just be forcing you to look at some shit you got in your bucket and you can’t smell it. That is a fucking GIFT.
Comments are so often more about the commenter than about you, but also, comments are also critical feedback. Not only do I take the time to offer private grammatical suggestions, I will often offer the author a link to a related story or piece of information that I think they might find useful. That adds value. Adding value gains respect. Respect earns you eyeballs. Eyeballs can turn into friends.
Link to other folks’ material. Make sure it’s all right if the material is sensitive, NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER use anything anyone else wrote without attribution. That just makes you a plagiarizing asshole. Please see these by Clay Rivers:
Do not take other people’s shit, people. Not only is that illegal, it’s immoral, and folks will come after you for it. Stupid move.
However, DO link to and show off other folks’ good work like I just did for Clay. Clay’s articles stand on their own and he’s an excellent writer. I want you to get the benefit of his material, and perhaps you might choose to follow him. Everyone wins. You steal, everyone loses. It’s called copyright law.
If someone said something unbelievably good and you want to steal it, ask permission, get it, then attribute UNLESS, as happened to me, folks don’t want to be acknowledged. Point is that lots of folks are tickled pink to have their words used as headlines, or a paragraph or story used to make a bigger point, complimentary please. Talk about making friends and loyal readers.
Why? Because folks like my Medium buddy Katie Andrews loves it when I retell her weight loss story, not only because it’s highly motivational, but also because I love acknowledging folks publicly. People notice when you are kind. They notice when you uplift. They notice when you take care to give attribution to the author of a great line. They learn that you are moral, safe, respectful, and you are not going to rip them off. If anything, these days I’ve got lots of folks asking me to link to and highlight their work. I don’t have enough time to do that, but that honor didn’t happen by accident. People are watching how you show up.
Have I been a public jerk at times? You betcha. I usually try to erase that shit, but over time I’ve learned to be a lot more mindful. My excuse, and you may not steal it, is that I’ve had twenty-two concussion (you can tell). I have wicked-ass bad days, and sometimes it shows. That means I have to work even harder to sit that shit down.
Wanna go even bigger? On many occasions, I’ve used success stories that I read in my comments to turn into articles about those folks. I ask permission, then someone else’s tale, which they didn’t feel comfy writing about, ends up being the core story line of a piece I do on everyday heroes, aging vibrantly, courage.
THAT is how you uplift others.
A number of my favorite Black writers have learned to trust my intentions because first, I love their work, second, I’ve been able to introduce a few to each other and third, they are well aware that I am wholly on board with what they’re trying to do. In some cases I’ve sent their work to some of my corporate contacts. That is part of what allyship looks like. Those relationships do not happen overnight, they grow quietly and over time. What you do and how you show up consistently demonstrate your character and conviction.
I got accused once by someone on Medium that I thought I could trust of using her stories and ideas to make money. Not only was that utterly untrue, it hurt deeply. However it caused me, and here’s the point, to be far more careful before I punch Publish. We make mistakes. Sometimes mistakes hurt people. And people choose to write your story without your permission. Doesn’t matter that it wasn’t what I intended. It is how it landed. Happens. Not much you can do other than learn from it.
You can see why if all you want to know is how to make money, this isn’t your article. There isn’t a single word in here about how to monetize the sacred souls who read our work. Because if we treat their eyeballs and attention as sacred, for again, they do not get that time back, then they will give us more time and attention. That is how we earn money on Medium, unpredictable staff notwithstanding.
I regularly make fun, not without some frustration, of how often I’ve had to rebuild my community because of structural changes inside Medium. Because of how those changes affected my earnings I am being forced to head elsewhere, but I am going to use precisely the same methods to grow an audience. I will keep writing here, but at some point you and I have to decide if we want to trade time for infinitesimal fractions of a cent, or if we are going to build our own thing. For me it’s the latter. At my age I am running out of runway.
But I haven’t run out of patience, or respect for Dear Reader. Writing is a sacred art. Let’s not abuse the right to reach other people by reducing them to dollar signs. These days, those of us who stand out, stand up for each other.
