To Get From 1,000 to 10,000 Followers, You Don’t Need a Personal Brand, You Need a Personality

The best marketing is to care, and things will fall into place

I decided to give Medium another try. I came back after a year, and the whole game changed. There was something called curation jail. And a post of mine didn’t get curated.

Panic at the disco!

I chose to ask this Medium avatar about it. Her stories are engaging. I put my ego aside and subscribed to her email list:

“Dear Ms…”

I hate email lists. Everybody has them. Usually, the first 3–4 emails are useful, but the rest are too self-promotional, long, and frequent. Freebies are often crappy. Generally, I don’t subscribe anymore.

I also have some experience in contacting Medium influencers via email:

• While I was still a reader, this guy asked me: “Why don’t you write something?” So I did. I sent him my first article. He never looked at it. I didn’t know it was a rhetorical question.
• The other one wanted to know how many followers I had — and then disappeared in a puff of smoke. I must have been a waste of time.
• The third never replied. Maybe he didn’t like the question. Men have feelings, you know.

Oh, c’mon, you guys.

Maybe they don’t like older women. Or they were too busy for me. So, I don’t expect much from writers here.

Now I was desperate enough to ask where I went wrong. After subscribing, I didn’t get her answer. I waited for a few days.

What was I thinking?

It would have been easier to get help from Elena Ferrante herself.

And then she answered (the Medium author, not Elena). In three paragraphs. She answered my question. In detail. Although she has 8,000 followers and her writing business.

How long did it take her to reply? Five minutes?

But she had me for good — she delivers value and behaves like a decent human being.

Now I wanted to look into her writing more deeply. She picks original angles. She wrote about cats’ toxoplasmosis in a business publication. I analyzed her titles. I clapped wholeheartedly.

Then I searched for her on Twitter. She says it inspires her to write. I checked her on Instagram. And Facebook. And I wanted to read more of her posts.

(I’m officially a stalker now.)

Then I wanted to check if I was just lucky. I don’t spam people, but I needed to see how much she really is devoted to her audience. And I didn’t subscribe to her services.

I emailed her asking where I could submit another piece.

And she replied. Again. In a chunk of a text. She stated two publications and asked me to send her a link to the published story.

Girl, don’t you know you’re a big cat?

When I told her I was thinking about getting into the top publications, she offered me help outside of her Patreon.

There is something wrong about Mary.

It’s unbelievable how little you need to get someone to read your articles in the future.

And this is why it works: if you want to be successful in what you offer (a course, a webinar, a consultation), you need customers. Not only because they will buy your products, but also because they will be your best promoters in the future.

According to HubSpot’s flywheel, your customers are not your afterthought. They are what you should be interested in most. They are not numbers on your profile — they are PEOPLE, like you.

You have kidneys — so do they!

And your personal brand isn’t a persona you’ve created so everyone could love you. It isn’t what’s hot on the market right now. Your personal brand is how you behave. It’s how helpful or generous you really are. The rest is baloney that people will eventually see right through.

Maybe one day, your customer will recommend you to a new client. Maybe they will become your loyal readers. Maybe you can learn something from them.

Maybe they will even have as many followers as you, so — hey — collaboration! And maybe they’ll buy your product without “the offer expires in 8 hours” or “I’ll tell you a secret if you buy my thing, I’m busy, busy, busy.”

Maybe you will feel better after you helped someone. Maybe you won’t see writing here as a rat race.

This is a place of great opportunities, and some people earn huge amounts of money on Medium. It also has a great Alexa rank and nearly 100,000,000 people read it, but it’s still a blogging platform, not The New York Times.

Those readers are people. If they need your help, provide it. Putting them first is the best marketing you can have. And you’ll enjoy it.

If you become popular here, it will be hard to maintain the same interaction as when you had 300 followers.

Still, try to be helpful outside of your public profile. Think: isn’t writing about communication after all? Where is yours? Only written and paid?

If you really want to be successful with your content, remember it’s not all about productivity. You don’t chase numbers to get 1,000 or 10,000 followers. It’s about your relationships. As Dave Schools says, people do business this way now:

“The future of community engagement is connection, not content — it’s people, not posts.”

And maybe someone with 300 followers could help you.

Thank you, Zulie Rane, for your help. Stay true to yourself even when you make it big. Your voice and approach to your audience are exceptional.

If you’d like to read more about social media, check these out: