Why you Shouldn’t Do Follow-for-Follow
Don’t waste any more time…
When beginning on Medium, I was looking for ways to increase quickly my number of subscribers. Indeed, it’s not very motivating to see your stories getting no reads.
I came across the follow-for-follow technique. It consists of a few steps:
- Follow everyone you can think about on Medium.
- Hope for them to follow you back.
- Repeat.
And that’s all. I read stories of people bragging about getting hundreds of subscribers in a few days this way. But is it really good?
You don’t want “ghost followers”
“Ghost followers” as I call them are followers who don’t read your stories. Increasing your followers you may think will increase your number of reads. Yeah, this works when your followers are interested in what you’re talking about and not when you’re followers are following you just because you follow them.
Subscribing can be seen as a friendly interaction. You follow someone, so he feels he owes you something and his way of thanking you is to subscribe in return. I don’t see things like this. If someone follows me, I’m grateful but I won’t subscribe in return, except if its content interests me.
You want interesting Medium recommendations
If you follow too many people, Medium’s algorithm won’t understand how to recommend interesting content for you. Your Medium feed will be polluted with tons of stuff you don’t want to read and you will waste more time trying to find interesting articles than actually reading.
It’s just a number
Well, not really. But it’s not as important as you think. The number of followers means nothing.
It won’t really increase your earnings. Indeed, according to Medium guidelines, earnings are not taking your number of followers into account to be calculated. In reality, the more followers you have, the more reads you will have if your content is cohesive with your audience (that’s why follow-for-follow is bad, it separates your audience from your content), so it will still increase your earnings.
Then, if you rely on followers, it won’t necessarily make you satisfied. Because eventually, you will have more followers than readers. And the most important to satisfy you are readers because you will feel like you’re making interesting content.
If you’re making good content, followers will come naturally
I think it will be the conclusion of the story. You have to be patient and don’t waste your time following random people. Instead, focus on your writing and if you’re doing it well, people will come naturally. And they won’t be “ghost followers”, but real followers, reading your stories.
Unfortunately, most of the new people on Medium are trying to reach 100 followers as fast as possible. First, don’t think it will change your life. Then, through this story, I demonstrated increasing your followers using follow-for-follow is even worse than having no followers.
For me, I reached 100 followers within a month without doing follow-for-follow. That’s not so long. And anyone can do it…
Be patient and your work will pay!
To explore more of my self-improvement stories, click here!
If you liked the story, don’t forget to clap and maybe follow me if you want to explore more of my content :)
You can also subscribe to me via email to be notified every time I publish a new story, just click here!
If you’re not subscribed to medium yet and wish to support me or get access to all my stories, you can use my link: