HOW TO GET FOLLOWERS ON MEDIUM: 3 strategies for beginners (these work for veterans, too!)
What I want to talk to you all about today is how to get followers on Medium. Before I jump in, I want to offer a few caveats.
HOW TO GET FOLLOWERS ON MEDIUM: 3 strategies for beginners (these work for veterans, too!)
First of all, followers are good, followers are part of how Medium decides who to show your stories to. However, unlike a lot of other social media platforms, followers are not the end-all-be-all. People can have many more or many fewer followers than you do and make very different amounts of money. I’ve made about the same amount of money every month regardless of how many followers I have. It has a lot more to do with the stories you publish, the quality of stories, and how many stories. Followers matter, but not as much as you think they do.
That being said, I’m excited to talk about the three different ways to get followers on Medium. I’m going to start with the least valuable and work my way up to the most valuable type of follower on Medium.
What is a valuable follower?
A valuable follower is someone who reads your work. That’s how you earn money on Medium by people reading your stories who are Medium members. With all that said, let’s jump right in and talk about how to get followers on Medium.
Number 1:
The first type of way I’m going to talk about, I’m not even going to count it among my top three. I’m going to use it more as a warning about what you shouldn’t do to get followers. When I first started on Medium, I did the follow-on-follow method. What that is you follow a bunch of people who have recently posted stories and topics that you care about and hope they follow you back. And then after a while, you unfollow them so that your follower to follow the metric stays valuable, whatever. This works. You will get followers like this. But for the reasons I explained earlier, those followers are not necessarily going to read your stories. They don’t necessarily care about anything you have to say. So although they’ll bump up your follower number, they might not earn you any money.
So you can do it. I would advise against it though because I think it’s kind of spammy. I wish I hadn’t done it. And I think that there are better ways to get followers. That’s the easy way to do it though.
What I want to talk about is not the easy way. It’s the best way. But if you’re not wanting to do any work, if you’re wanting to game the system, if you’re just trying to increase that number as fast as you can, this is not the right blog for you. If you want to get followers that are going to care about your stores that are going to read and engage with them, and that are going to be your future audience, then hopefully this will help you.
Okay, so type number one, is regular followers. On Medium, just like on WordPress, you can publish anything you want. You can type up three sentences about why you love cats, title it, why I love cats and publish it and it will be there out on the internet for anyone to find. Because the internet is a huge place, it probably won’t be found by that many people. But let’s say somebody does and they share it on Facebook or whatever, or I’m browsing people who have recently tagged their story cats and I happen across your story. I might say, Hey, that’s a pretty cool story about why they love cats. I like that. I’m going to follow that person. That’s the first way to do it. It’s the least valuable because it’s hard to do it this way. Even if you have amazing SEO skills, you’re not going to get that many followers on Medium by just throwing your story out into the void, especially if you’re new, if you don’t have an existing audience. So if you have like a Facebook group already or if you have a huge Twitter following, this might work for you. You just publish and throw stories out there and hope for the best. If you’re like me and like the majority of other people who don’t have an existing audience, this method won’t work that well for you because it’s the internet is so broad that it’s going to be very, very unlikely that someone just happens to stumble across your work.
Number 2:
If you’re not giving it a boost through a different method, that leads me nicely onto the second way to get followers using publications. Like I said on Medium, you can publish anything on your blog, under your profile, and that’s fine. You don’t have to do anything with that. However, the medium also has something called publications. People can follow individuals like me and publications like the startup, the ascent, and PSI love you are some of the big examples. If I write a story and I’m like, oh man, I have no existing audience, I need to leverage an audience somehow. How do I get it? Use a publication. Publications are already followed by tens, hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people sometimes. So if you manage to get your story included in one of those publications, you can use that existing audience. Try to get into publications with good audiences. It’s important to note here that good does not necessarily equal big.
The startup is followed by I think half a million people, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get half of that half a million views on my story. A good audience on the medium means engagement.
So for example, I’ve had a good amount of success with PSI love you. They only publish about relationships, whereas on the startup, you can publish pretty much anything you want. But because they have a niche, because they’re more specific about what they publish, they have a much more engaged following. People know what they’re going to get with them. And that means that when I publish something with them, my story tends to have a more engaged reception. That’s good because when somebody is reading something by PSI love you, that’s like a stamp of approval. They’re like, oh wow, this author was published in PSI love you. I want to read more of what they have to say, even if it’s not necessarily about relationships. Follow. There you go. That’s the second type of following. When somebody follows you through your publishing your publication, how can you do this? I would spend some time researching publications, Google medium publications, and then topics that interest me to see if they publish recently, see how often they publish, see how many authors they have, look at how many claps those stories are getting, try to get a feel for the engagement level. Are people commenting? Are people sharing? That’s going to be your metric for a good audience if these stories are getting a lot of views, a lot of reads. Find publications that fit your niche. If you don’t like relationships, don’t try to get into PSI love you because that’s all they do. If you’re interested in art and history, there’s a publication for you. If you’re interested in science, there’s a publication for you. Design is a publication for you. Try to find publications that have to do with the topics that you’re interested in if you want to get the most engaged followers possible. These followers are going to care about what you post. They’re going to read what you post and they’re going to be a very, very good follower to have.
Number 3:
All right, on to the third type of follower, which in my opinion is the most valuable, the curation follower. If you’re new to these videos slash medium, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Luckily for you, here’s a very, very quick explanation of what curation is. When you publish on medium, almost every single story is reviewed by a curator and they look at that and they say, wow, that story is awful. I’m not going to curate it. Or they say, wow, that story was amazing. I’m going to curate it into a topic. Topics are different from publications. If you go to medium.com forward slash topics, you’ll see that there are about 100 odd topics that medium curates stories into. So for example, if I write a story about how my cat Astrid, who’s next to me, saved my relationship with my boyfriend and a curator reads it and likes it, they might distribute it into the topics, pets and relationships and self, for example.
People follow topics on medium. The medium story recommendation algorithm is driven by topics, not by followers, not by publications, by topics. So if your story gets distributed into a topic, people who follow that topic, which every single reader on the medium is prompted to do as soon as they create their account, your story will be shown to those people.
The reason this is the most valuable follower is because:
A. they’re engaged. They’ve chosen to follow that topic.
B. Medium curating is again, like a high stamp of approval. That’s a medium saying, I like this story. And
C. I can’t wait for numbers or letters now, but whatever, the third most important reason is that medium curation means that your story is going to be shown to people who follow that topic on the app, on the homepage, and the email recommendations. Anywhere that medium publishes and makes a recommendation, your story is going to appear to the right people who are interested in the topics you’re publishing about. That’s why I think curation is the most important way to get followers.
So if you’re now wondering, okay, that sounds amazing, how do I get curated?
I’m going to recommend you do three things.
First of all, Google, medium curation guidelines, medium lays out very, very strict rules on what makes a story good for them, read them, study them, memorize them, figure out what’s going to make you write stories in a way that medium approves of. It’s hard, there’s a learning curve, but it is so, so, so worth it.
Secondly, Google, how to be curated on medium. So many talented authors have taken time out of their day to write comprehensive guides on how they recommend being curated. It’s worth reading those. People are going to give you good insights.
Third, Read stories that have been curated into the topics you’re interested in. If you like art, or go to the art topic on medium and say, okay, let’s read these stories. See what’s possible, let yourself be inspired, see what the medium’s looking for, the breadth and the depth of what makes them think. Yeah, that’s a good story.
In summary, there are three ways to get followers on a medium. You can just publish into the void. You can try to leverage the audience that exists in publications and you can try to be curated into topics. You can do all of them, you can do none of them, but stories that are published in publications can also be created in topics.
As always, the overarching way to get followers on the medium is you can’t game the system, you can’t try to hack your way into getting followers. Write good stories, write as many of them as you can, as you care about, and your audience will find you.
Thank you so much for reading this blog. If you like this kind of thing, please feel free to follow me. If you’re still left with questions, drop them in the comment box, and have a wonderful rest of your week. I’ll see you all next Sunday. Bye!