Want More Followers? Steal My 3 Best Strategies for How I Earned 100 Followers In January

This isn’t about earning your first 100 followers, although you could use this strategy to get there.

I earned my first 100 followers back in November. This is how I got the next set of 100, all within one single month.

If you look at the date of my first article on Medium, you’ll see I started writing on June 29th of 2021, which means it took nearly 5 months to build to 100 followers. Here’s the number one mistake I made during that time.

Lots of Navel Gazing

Medium is a social media platform without the raunchy DM’s.

Because people on the platform see it as social media, it’s massively important to engage with other writers and follow those you actually enjoy reading.

This has allowed me to strike up conversations in the comment section with amazing writers like Scott Stockdale and Justiss Goode.

I wasn’t greedy in the comments (“can you follow me back?”). That’s not what the platform is about and honestly, it’s a little annoying.

Instead, I added valuable insights to their work. Not just the “cool article”, but actually processing of what I enjoyed in my own words.

Russell Brunson, entrepreneur and co-founder of Clickfunnels, talks about how when he first came to Twitter, he was trying to sell his products and he scared people away.

He realized he was killing the party, and people don’t want that.

When you only ask people to follow you back and don’t add value to what they create, you kill the party. So engage in a way that makes you human and not a robot with sentience.

Show Up To The Party

I come from making content on Instagram. That was a failed endeavour and here’s why.

In January, I wrote every single day on Medium, including Saturday and Sunday, something I never tried on Instagram because it drained me.

Writing gives me life. It makes me wanna do a keg stand even though I know my poor upper body strength couldn’t hold me up.

But I didn’t just write in my personal diary. I published nearly all of my content, totalling 21 pieces in January on Medium.

Posting nearly every day put me in front of new audiences and more people.

In fact, in January, I hit my 100th blog post too. So showing up works. It doesn’t work instantly, but it does give you the reps to keep going and not give up.

Be Blindfolded to the Results

I didn’t look at a lot of my numbers until the end of the month.

What I was doing wasn’t about the views. It wasn’t about the reads. It was about building the habit and being there every day.

Writing daily while teaching full-time allowed me to prove to myself that it was possible to develop valuable habits while everything else moved around me.

The lessons I learned were less about metrics and more about who I am.

I wanted to be the kind of person that was reliable to my audience, and I did that. I was desperate to show that this is my biggest priority besides my wife, and my time reflects that.

This week alone, I’ve had four days off from work because of an ice storm and I wrote and created every single day anyway. My friends at work? Probably slept in and binge-watched tv.

No shade. I did that too. But only after I put in the work. Did my stats increase? Of course, but only because I didn’t quit and make excuses.

What’s the Secret Sauce?

There isn’t any. That’s what people don’t like to hear. People don’t like to know that it’s going to take months of showing up even when you just had parent/teacher conferences and after tutoring and chess club.

Most of us don’t want real results–we want artificial ones that come from begging for followers and I’m just not down for that.

I didn’t even do it in my CTA’s at the end of the article. In January, all of them pointed directly to my email list, which gained a follower in the chaos.

The secret? Be an actual human being. Be genuinely interested in what other people have to say. Create content that other people want to engage with and relate to, and be the life of the party instead of the buzzkill.

For more unconventional business advice, here’s my free Business Beginner’s Bootcamp guide, where you’ll learn from my wild mistakes as well as how to grow your business from the ground up.