The 8 Hacks That Lead To 15,000 Medium Followers
The obvious answer is write great stuff and people will follow you. While great content is key, that’s just the table stakes. It turns out…
The obvious answer is write great stuff and people will follow you. While great content is key, that’s just the table stakes. It turns out there’s a lot you can do to complement your great writing to grow your Medium following.
Here are my Top 8 Medium hacks:
Write more often — The more you do anything, the better you get. However often you’re writing, you can write more. Great posts are lightening in a bottle. The more often you write, the higher the chances of lightening in a bottle. Since focusing on crypto two years ago I’ve written 91 posts. Eight of those became the #1 most read piece on Medium tagged Bitcoin/Crypto. The 10+ days when my post was #1 accounted for more than 40% of all my follows. Apparently, LOTS of people read the #1 post and follow that writer. The more you write, the more likely you are to have a #1 piece that dramatically accelerates your follower growth.
Don’t Worry What Other People Think About Your Writing — I write for me. I write about what I want to learn about:
I hope people like it. But I’ve largely divorced myself from taking it personally.
3. Less is more. Write shorter posts — The shorter your posts, the more posts you can write. But more importantly, people don’t read long posts. If readers don’t finish a story, if they don’t get to the end, they can’t clap. I rarely go over 6 minutes in length. This one minute read has my highest “Read Ratio” (the % of people who finish an post) at 78%. After I write a post, I spend an additional 10%-20% of time pruning it back. Taking out extraneous words, sentences, and paragraphs.
4. Write Great Headlines — Here’s a great post on writing headlines. Pair it with the “perfect image” and the “right tags.”
5. Ask for claps — The more claps a story has, the more often Medium recommends it to relevant readers. So don’t be shy about asking for claps:
Example of how I beg for claps
6. Leverage social media better- However your leveraging social media, you could probably be doing it much better. Are you posting at the right time? Are you re-tweeting yourself? Are you tagging other users in your posts? There are lots of simple hacks via social media.
7 Add Your Post To A Medium Publication- A great way to get early readers to your post is to add it to “Publications” on Medium that aggregate traffic around particular topics of interest. Here’s a Medium post about adding a post to a publication. After benefiting from the added distribution provided by publications, we (CryptoOracle) started a publication ourselves.
8. Start An Email Distribution List — You can start by importing your gmail contact list in to SendGrid or Mailchimp. I add to my list every, single, day. It gives me a more direct relationship with my readers. Over the last year, my emails have generated 522 clicks on average. Emails also get forwarded to new readers, on average, 0.61 times for each person on the distribution list that opens the email.
Growing an email list is a slog. People unsubscribe (about 0.5% of the people on a distribution list unsubscribe each send, on average). People leave jobs and their emails bounce (about 0.4% on average). Since I started my list in 2013, about 1/3 of everyone added to the list is now longer subscribed:
A screenshot from my Mailchimp account
But it’s well worth the effort. A box at the bottom of each post drives people to sign up (see the bottom of this post).
If you have other hacks let me know in the comment section below. I’m sure there are lots more than 8 hacks to skin the Medium follower cat.
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