Writing | Stats | Tips
Writing Success? — Results Of My First 27 Days On Medium
Analysis of my personal stats for April 2020
Hello everyone,
I’d like to finish this month with another look at my stats to document my journey so far. It’s been an incredible month for me in terms of writing as a passion and I’ve made many incredible friends along the way. I truly found my calling here.
Since many people are curious about stats (and some are only in it for the money) I lay my stats open for all to analyze and take apart. I don’t follow any pattern or scheme, but maybe you see something in it that I myself miss.
A quick heads-up
Before we dive into it: My mantra for writing is “write what you’d like to read yourself”, because that’s the most honest form of writing in my own opinion. I won’t try to write about “These 5 tips will quadruple your income” or stuff like that.
I’ve read a lot of those over the years (as I too searched for the magical answer) and came to the conclusion that their authors don’t write it because they found the magical solution, but because that very article is their attempt at true success. It’s often an article stretched to 10 or more minutes, aiming to squeeze all the reading time out of their readers (because that’s what pays). Maybe even trying to sell you a course at the end.
The tips themselves were often the same old, ambiguous tips, without any real stats to back it up. It felt just like a waste of time. This article won’t give you “guaranteed tips to success” either. I talk about what I do and how I do it. That’s all.
I don’t even deem these stats a success yet. I’ve been here less than a full month. What I do see as a success though, are the people I met, who welcomed me with open arms and who’ve become like family to me.
You can’t buy kindness with money. Pick your poison.
If you’re in it for the money
Then I’d like to point one thing out: Only 8% of all writers here earn more than $100 per month. Even then, this does not mean they make $2000 or more. They could well be stuck at $115.
So don’t see this article as the solution to easy money, cause it’s not. With my current growth, I suspect I should be able to earn a living through it in 1 or 2 years. Luckily, that’s not my primary goal. To pay my bills, I am an established freelancer.
If you have missed my first entry about stats from April 12th, you can find it here:
This article was mainly my hymn of praise for Illumination, since I credit my early lift entirely to this publication, without which I’d still hunt for scraps in the gutter. And this praise continues here, as you’ll soon see.
Views, Reads, Fans
Before I even got into this whole writing thing, I stumbled upon an article that shared stats, just like I do here. That was the only metric I had when starting out.
That guy had 1,000 views in his first month and earned about $10 or $20 with it. I thought if I can get there, I’m on a good way.
My views as of now — April 30, 2020, 1:30 PM (JST)
6,491 views. That’s 5,491 views more than I set my mind to. I’m not invisible, yay!
The above stats always include all my responses to other articles. So my true “Story View Count” is at 4,196 views across 64 stories.
Top-Views peak was April 25th with 473 views.
I don’t know how much the writer has written whose stats I measured mine against. It might well be that he just didn’t write as much.
He also was not part of a publication.
Views are not reads though, people see your article on the screen, but they don’t click on it. So let’s take a look at how many people actually read my stories.
My reads as of now — April 30, 2020, 1:30 PM (JST)
4,367 reads. Again, this number includes all my responses to articles of other writers.
Summing up only reads counted on my articles, I get 2,425 reads across 64 stories.
1,942 reads were from my responses to other writers.
Top-Reads peak was on April 12th with 327 reads.
If you want to be a good writer, you need to become a good reader first.
So, engage with your peers, be there for them. Focus on their success. They will give you your own in return. It’s not a competition. It’s a team effort.
I can’t stress this enough. If you’re just here for your own success, go home. If I was, I wouldn’t lay my cards open like this. We can grow incredibly if we all work together.
My fans as of now — April 30, 2020, 1:30 PM (JST)
Fans are the people who actually engage with your articles and responses, leaving comments or clapping on it. As soon as someone does either of those things, your fan count will go up by 1.
1,919 fans. And once again I will whip out the calculator to see how many of those come from my articles.
1,070 fans across 64 stories. This shows that 849 fans come from my responses to other writers’ articles.
Top-Fans peak was on April 25th with 131 fans.
Now let’s take a look at the top articles in each area and determine if we can see a pattern or something.
Top 5 Articles
I’ll sort my stories list in each area and pick the top 5 to see which articles are being viewed, read and liked.
Top 5 by views
The top article in terms of views has been “The Misconception Of Competition VS. Community”. And I know exactly why. Take a look:
I first published that story under Illumination on April 22nd. On April 23rd, Illumination was temporarily shut down. My articles were now tagged as not belonging to any publication. Stephen Muskett from Age of Awareness approached me and asked me whether I’d like to publish this article with his publication.
After I did, I noticed that this article is also gaining external views via News360.com. This is an interesting spike that I discussed with Dr Mehmet Yildiz, wondering if we can use this outlet to increase our reach in the same way for all articles.
In my opinion, that article is not great. I have others who I personally deem much more useful. The article also has a very low view to read conversion, as readers don’t click on it. I don’t blame them. Imagine we’d use this outlet to publish something that people actually want to read.
I’m still waiting for news on if and how we can use News360 here at Illumination.
The other top viewed articles are all related to our publication. Our submission guidelines followed by my blackout article, which talked about the sudden and unexplained shutdown of our publication together with the suspension of Dr. Yildiz’s personal account.
The last one on this list is my first article revealing my personal stats.
Top 5 by reads
In terms of reads, both our official Submission Guidelines and my article “Caught In A Blackout” are again up on top, together with my first stats-article. The other 2, “Illumination” and “Strangers” are Haikus, little poems consisting of no more than 17 syllables.
Top 5 by Read-Ratio
In terms of ratio, my best articles have been
2. Another Day In Paradise — Small Fiction Story
4. David Versus Goliath — Poem
So here, poetry seems to be the most effective. It’s short and entertaining. Not a long dry read of several minutes that requires you to burn your brain matter too much on profound topics.
Top 5 by Fans
The Illumination Submission Guidelines, though only written recently, attract the most fans. Mostly new writers who want to join our publication or experienced writers who found a useful nugget within.
I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, it does have profound information to help you in jumpstarting your writing. On the other hand, we are a team of editors and I feel dirty for being the one whose stats got boosted by that article. I didn’t think about it having such an impact on my personal stats.
I have since written an article regarding our options on this platform. I’d like to be able to share this article with all our editors since we’re all part of this.
It would feel great if I could just put all our editors into the author list of those submission guidelines and share the metrics.
And here is the full list of my article stats:
This list includes all my articles, sorted by date.
How useful is curation really?
When I first started out here on April 3rd, I didn’t even know what curation is. When an official Medium editor finds your article, they’ll see whether it is worth sharing in one of several topics or not. Someone said they didn’t get curated in 9 months or so of writing.
So I thought it must be something really special. It would mean your article would get shared across official pages and reach more readers. I thought it’s the Magnum Opus of writing here.
Turns out, it’s not. Look at this.
“Disbelief” curated for Poetry and Humor on Apr. 28th “The Misconception Of Competition VS. Community” (published in AoA) curated for Self and Work on Apr. 24th “What Makes A Good Teacher?” curated for Education on Apr. 22nd “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome” curated for Mindfulness and Self on Apr. 21st “Silence” curated for Poetry on Apr. 28th “Complete” (published in P.S. I Love You) curated for Poetry on Apr. 12th “David vs Goliath” curated for Poetry on Apr. 23rd “How I Used ’The Art of War’ To Grow Personally” curated for Self on Apr. 5th
This is a complete list of all my curations to date, the order is from latest to oldest article by date of publishing.
Did you see them dominate my stats above? No? Tells you enough, right. Curation seems to be a nice thing to have, but it won’t say anything about the quality or popularity of your articles.
What’s way better in terms of writing success is the support I receive daily from my friends here at Illumination. If our Illumination editors pick your article for our daily feature, you can be certain that it will hit a spike in its statistics.
My article about stats was selected for a feature once, and within a single day, it trumped my “How I Used ’The Art of War’ To Grow Personally” article, which at the time was floating in the curation list for more than a week.
It just shot past within a day.
So don’t stress about whether or not one of your articles gets curated or not. Just write what you’d love to read yourself, engage with our community, share opinions, initiate writing prompts, move outside your comfort zone, try poetry, get creative. The more you show others, the more of yourself will be seen.
I Got A Twitter Followership
I was asked by some of my friends here whether I have Twitter. I did not. So I set it up, just for fun.
By now, within 3 weeks, I got 1,025 followers, all of which are part of the writing community there. I can share our articles with them and attract outside readers.
If you haven’t used it yet, it’s about time you start. It takes some time to gain followers at first, but by now it seems to be a wonderful social media to get your stories shared. Just by using Twitter, I can now have 1,000 potential readers that someone without Twitter is missing out on.
Connect with people you know and be ready to step forward, connecting with strangers. Make use of things such as a #Writerslift (people ‘share’ their followers with each other, all profit from an increased network)
Think about it. It’s free too.
And I Became An Editor For Illumination
Just before our lights were forced out, I received an offer to become an editor for the team, following my support on all fronts. How could I refuse?
But it turns out that it’s really busy. I would like to write more of my own, but see myself confronted with countless submissions. Often, some people even line up 5 or 6 articles in a row. How? 😳
Since I try to prioritize our writers over myself, I write less than before. No long articles (except for this one now) and mostly just poetry or Haiku. I need to find my balance with this. But it’s a great opportunity for me to help Illumination with its growth and I am curious about what our future holds.
I grew from being a nobody to a leading editor within this family and am more than proud to help where I can. By helping others, my own success seems to come all by itself.
About Earnings
Oh and almost forgot, I know some only care about money. If you really want to know, my Premium thing says I currently got $85.09 in the Partner Program. It’s not yet the infamous 8% border of getting over $100, but it’s something.
A final word to all our new writers at Illumination
I’d like to welcome you all formally. With so many new people daily, it’s difficult to shake hands with even just one of them. You’re just like me new to Illumination and will slowly find your bearings.
If you ever got a question, join our Slack channel or hit me up, here, in a response, or on Twitter. I’m willing to talk, whether it be writing or just a friendly chat. I’m here to make friends. I want to be your friend.
Editing, reading and writing gets really busy at times. On top of that, I got my own family that needs me. But I’ll always try to help out to the best of my abilities.
We all try to help each other as best as we can.
All the best on your path, wherever it may take you.
I’ll just keep reading and writing on.
Thank you.
Kevin is an editor and writer for the ILLUMINATION publication. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
