I started writing on Medium almost a year ago, and it took me just over a month to get into the Medium Partner Program.
The Medium Partner Program (which isn’t currently open to every Country, but hopefully that will change soon), lets you make your stories member only, which means you’ll be paid every time a Medium subscriber reads them.
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s hard work to get a decent income from Medium. Chances are you won’t be able to quit your day job and have a nice time writing from the comfort of your living room and to pay the bills, at least for a long time (of course there are a few exceptions to the rule).
However, to even think about joining the Medium Partner Program you need to start writing and get 100 followers.
I’ve got two accounts on Medium, both are now part of the Medium Partner Program, and I’ve been trying different approaches to get followers on each.
The three main ways to get followers on Medium are:
- Follow for follow
- Read and comment
- Submit to publications
Follow for follow
This is probably the most commonly talked about way to increase your followers quickly.
You can follow up to 130 people each day, and a certain number of them will follow you back.
Write a few articles first, so people have a reason to follow you, then search for the topics you write about to find people to follow, don’t forget to follow their followers too (you can see who follows them on their profile page).
This should get you to your 100 followers very quickly. However, if you do it this way also take the time to write some decent articles, and wait a few days before you apply for the Medium Partner Program, they can reject you if it looks like you’re just spamming to apply.
Read and comment
My main account I grew and have kept growing through reading and commenting on other people’s stories.
I decided to try this approach because I wanted to be more involved with the Medium community, but I didn’t want my feed full of stories that didn’t interest me. So I only followed a handful of authors.
By commenting on others’ stories you’re not only being seen by the author, but by everyone who looks at their comments too. I often get replies and follows from leaving a comment months after I’ve made it.
This approach does take a bit more dedication as you need to take time to read through stories and make relevant comments.
Submit to publications
This is something I wish I had done earlier.
Publications are like magazines for various topics. They’re run by editors (other Medium writers), and you can submit your stories to relevant ones once you’ve applied to join.
Publications can be followed, so you get your story in front of their readers, editors, and others who publish with them.
Look for publications that are relevant to your writing, have a lot of followers, have articles with a lot of responses (claps and comments), and who don’t publish too many articles per day, or yours may be pushed down out of sight quickly.
Bonus: Tagging/Topics
A bit of a bonus tip to get more followers is to tag with relevant search terms (or Topics as Medium calls them).
When you publish your story you have five Topics you can use to appear under when people search. These Topics can be anything, but as you type you will get suggestions in a drop-down box, and next to the suggestions there are some interesting statistics, they change depending if you’re publishing on a computer to publishing through the Medium mobile app.
If you’re on a computer, you see how many other stories are published under that Topic.
If you’re using the Medium mobile app, the number will show how many people are following that Topic. This means when you publish your story with that Topic, it will show up in that Topics feed on their homepage.
You can utilize any of these options, a mix of them, or go for all three! You will hit your first 100, and more, easily.