How to Implement an Effective Growth Strategy for Medium
Don't wear yourself out working like a robot! Instead, follow good, sustainable practices
Hello Everyone,
Last week I received a wonderful email from Alberto Cabas Vidani. Alberto is active both on Medium and Substack here:
. I know that several of his articles have received Medium’s Boost, and I even worked with him on one that was accepted.Alberto had some questions for me that I think might be of interest to a lot of readers out there. I’ve actually been contemplating his perspective for the last 5-6 days.
There are so many variables that make up each writer’s journey that it’s difficult to identify universal good practices. However, I can walk you through what I’ve done and you can see if any of the tactics I’ve used might provide some insight.
Follower growth
Here’s my profile page on Medium:
As I understand it, the top tier of writers on Medium are the people with 100k+ followers. That includes Jessica Wildfire (128k), Zulie Rane (162k), Umair Haque (228k), and Tim Denning (325k). I know all these writers to a greater or lesser extent.
I’ve read Jessica’s articles and received some personal comments. Zulie is one of the editors for Better Marketing so she worked with me on this article (which was Boosted). Umair once linked one of my articles to the end of one of his and I saw a HUGE traffic jump. I’ve never talked with Tim at all—he seems to post mainly in Illumination-Curated these days which seems odd to me.
As a general rule, follower count is misleading. It’s easy to assume that somebody is making thousands of dollars per month because they have a quarter of a million followers, but that’s not necessarily the case. The bigger indicator is subscribers (people who get your stories in their inbox).
My audience growth over the last 12 months
Here is my audience page going back a year:
The “Referred Members” program was discontinued about six months ago, that’s why that particular number either stays static or drops. I kind of wish they’d lose those two columns to be honest (they can keep the earnings though). I suppose after all my referred members have quit the program, that column will disappear entirely.
For the month of March, both my followers and email subscribers have been low. I suspect that’s because Medium’s been doing another bot purge. You shouldn’t panic when your numbers go down, sometimes it just means the platform is scrubbing fake accounts.
This whole year is “the year of the Boost.” Also, In July, Medium rolled out some changes to the platform and my follower count exploded for some reason. I went from averaging around 500 new followers a month, to thousands with a peak of 7.6k in a single month.
Why did this happen?
Honestly, I don’t exactly know, but I do have some theories.
In case you’re curious, I published my 1,000th article on Medium in February of 2023, you can read about it here (I put the post in Illumination). I think being well-established on the platform helps too, but there are other good practices to consider.
Taking advantage of Tags
There used to be this thing on Medium where you’d get an email that said “Congratulations! You’re a top writer in Travel!” It looked like this:
One of the most important things to do when you publish a story on Medium is to use appropriate tags (or topics). I see a lot of submissions to my publications where writers:
Use poor tags
Fail to use all 5 tags
If you’ve made this mistake, you can get back into your stories and change the tags. From the “edit” menu, click on the link that says “change topics” and you’ll see this:
The practice I follow is to always use keywords from Medium’s official list of 73 topics.
has a great resource article where she lists them all here.I think around June (when I experienced that follower growth I was talking about) Medium changed up their format. The “top writer” badges became a thing of the past, and it was replaced with a topics page that looks like this:
Now you see all the topics along the top of the page, but my understanding is (this is speculation mind you) that the official 73 topics are still more “powerful” than the other keywords.
I think another thing that’s helped me is that I’m listed as one of the top Racism writers down at the bottom of the page:
I know everyone in that list except for Richard Lowenthal. I’ve nominated stories for all of those writers (except Richard), to be boosted. This is a great group of people to follow.
I’m on the list with Black Lives Matter too:
How do you get listed on those pages?
Honestly, I have no idea how many places my profile appears on the medium topic pages. I can say that I made a concerted effort to be a “top writer” in as many topics as possible
I used to see other profiles where writers would put “3 time top writer.” I’m not sure what formula they used to determine that. It used to be that you’d get bumped off the list and then regain your status with the next popular article. So, I think people were keeping track of the number of times they dropped off and regained the list.
At one point, I was a top writer in about 20 different categories. I thought it might be fun to roll up my sleeves and get myself designated as a top writer in EVERY Medium category, but some of them just don’t fit into anything I like to write about (Fashion, NBA…).
That being said, going through the list of tags is a great way to get some inspiration. Remember that Medium works with “affinity.” The distribution mechanism of the platform tries to put readers in touch with the stories they’re most interested in.
Therefore, if you use new tags, you reach a new audience. A new audience is the pond from which you can harvest your new followers.
Don’t try to “game the system”
One of the things that I’ve learned in my time working with Medium is that they’re a lot smarter than I am at determining legitimate vs illegitimate traffic. If you have a great personal story about basketball which you can use as an example to explain a complex economic theory, then, yes, use “NBA,” “Finance,” “Economics,” “Advice,” and “Entrepreneurship” as your tags.
But don’t use those tags if there’s nothing in the article that relates to those things. Every tag you use has to be legitimately connected to some crumbs in an article that will interest a target audience.
I looked at Alberto’s profile and he’s sitting at about 4.6k followers. I scrolled down my audience statistics and found that’s where I was sitting back in May of 2022:
So, essentially, I’m just 2 years ahead of Alberto on my Medium journey. It can change quickly. But also remember that the platform has changed a LOT since 2022, and I think you can get a lot more visibility today than you could get back then.
I just triggered the warning flag that says I’m at my email length limit, but that’s okay. I don’t want to overwhelm you all with information. As always, good luck, and leave your questions below!
Hi Walter, great post, thanks for sharing.
Wow, it's like we're moving along in parallel universes here, but you are about 2 light years ahead.
To support what you're saying, I recently wrote an article on tags/topics (In New Writers Welcome) hypothesizing, like you, that my recent jump in followers was because I was showing up on the "Who To Follow" page for a few important tags/topics (Data Analysis, Data Storytelling, Prompt Engineering, Python). The jump in followers started in Dec/2023, which is when I noticed that my ugly mug was showing up on the Topics pages.
At the same time, my # of boosts seemed to increase (I had a total of 2 before Dec, I've had 13 since).
Hi Walter, for a video of mine I reached out to Medium to find out how they call those "top writers" in the categories. The category that's leading the ranking now is tech, followed by AI. I think AI will soon be #1 which is scary I think.
I loved the top writers badges, guess similar to the boost Medium wants to reward MORE people. With 500 topics they can support 500 people. It used to be 73 topics.
I'm also "top writer" in 3 categories but as you said you have to pumpt out a lot of long form stories OR get boosted and then get a lot of comments etc. to get featured.
Would love to learn more about those new "top writers". Eve Arnold is one in #writing or Derek and it helps them get seen and read.