Medium has been around for a while. Some people sing its praises. Others are vocal about how Medium continues to change their business model to their detriment
Whatever.
That’s not why I’m on Medium. Though I’ve been republishing articles on the platform for a while, I’ve never focused on it. It’s never been and will never be our base of operations. It’s more like a loosely defended outpost.
It was always a small piece to an overall content marketing strategy. One of the reasons I never went too deep into it was because when you publish on Medium, you’re just another Medium writer.
I cease to be Daniel Ndukwu or KyLeads. You lose your identity unless you’ve already brought a huge audience with you. I didn’t. Apart from that, the reporting features leave a lot to be desired.
I’ve never adopted a consistent strategy specific to Medium. If I wanted to write something that didn’t fit into the topic of our blog then I’d just publish a Medium article. That was all the thought I gave to it.
Some of them were successful. Most weren’t.
In April 2018 that changed. I decided to give it 30 days of consistent effort and measure the results. This article sums up my learnings.
Where I started my Medium experiment
On April 12, 2018, I started my Medium experiment. The premise was simple. Write an article every day for thirty days. I also put a few limitations on myself:
- I couldn’t email my list
- I wouldn’t promote it (apart from Twitter) across the internet
- The only extra push would be from Medium publications
- I wouldn’t tell anyone about the experiment so they wouldn’t visit my Medium profile more often.
Apart from that, I was free to write about any and everything. The only other thing I tried to do was link back to KyLeads on relevant articles. This wasn’t a big deal; it was just something I kept in mind.
I started the experiment with 731 followers.
I had 420 article views and 134 reads in the thirty days before I started the experiment.
It’s important to note I wasn’t exactly starting from scratch. I’m by no means the most popular writer on Medium but a few people follow me and clap for my articles regularly. In addition to a few followers, I’m also a writer for a half a dozen publications.
During the course of the experiment, I didn’t hustle for my articles to be featured in any new publications. If you’re brand new to Medium, that may be one of the most effective things you can do to get more eyeballs on your content.
Now, let’s look at what actually happened during my Medium experiment.
The Medium Writing Experience
As I mentioned before, I’m a writer for many publications on Medium. The plan was to write an article and submit to them on a daily basis.
I quickly ran into a snag. The editors are busy people. They get submissions all day every day. It takes time for them to review and accept a submission. I didn’t take that into account.
I’d submit one article a day and sometime three of them would get published at the same time. If you look at my timeline, you’ll see I would publish up to four articles at the same time.
That wouldn’t work for what I was trying to accomplish.
I stopped submitting first. Instead, I’d publish directly then submit to publications. They could accept at their leisure and I’d get the benefit of adding my work to a publication while keeping a consistent schedule.
It worked out pretty well. Not all my articles were accepted. Either it wasn’t a good fit or I removed it from one publication and added it to another because I felt like I’d get more exposure that way.
In the end, out of 30 articles, 19 were accepted to publications. Not bad.
Engagement increased
One thing I noticed was an increase in engagement across the board. I was expecting a few shares and claps. I got more than that. People were commenting on the articles and highlighting parts that stood out to them.
I think this was in part due to the way I was writing. Usually, I write about topics related to entrepreneurship and marketing. During the thirty day period, I touched on a wider range of topics. With many of them, I was shooting from the hip.
What I mean by that is my articles weren’t as narrow in scope. I wrote about a variety of subjects like how I felt like giving up at times, not going for broke, and overwork. It appealed to a wider audience.
There was just a larger amount to consume. Gary V refers to this as content, on content, on content. His process is a bit more sophisticated.
Many of those people may not become subscribers or customers. It’s all good. They may still introduce me to the person that will. Apart from that, it’s interesting to see which parts of an article resonate with people the most.
The results of my Medium writing
The part you’ve been waiting for. What actually happens when you write on Medium for a full month?
For me, the metric I wanted to improve the most was my Medium follower count. While I got a little boost, it was negligible. This is probably due to the fact that I didn’t promote the articles much.
I started with 731 followers and ended with 759 followers.
That’s an increase of 28 followers or roughly 4%. My target was to hit a thousand followers or a 36% increase. I failed woefully in that regard.
Looking back, I could have utilized more calls to action. For the most part, I just wrote and published. Only a handful of the articles had any sort of call to action to speak of.
Let’s look at my traffic stats.
After thirty days of writing on Medium, I got 1421 views on my articles and 488 reads.
I started with 420 views which is a 338% increase. Not bad. As far as actual reads, I started with 134 and increased it by 364%. Also not bad.
Even though I started with pretty low numbers, I’m happy with the increase. But these are stats for my Medium activity. More important to me is how many people left medium and went to my websites.
Google seemed to have trouble picking up the referrals sent from Medium. Luckily, I was also using a short link via bit.ly.
That one picked up 27 clicks to our website.
Out of the 488 people that read my articles, a little over 5% clicked through to my website. Ehn, it’s not great and it’s not horrible. If it was an advertisement I would be jumping for joy.
It could’ve been improved a lot if I was actively promoting something. What I was doing was linking in the body of my content. There was no call to action or anything of that nature. So, I’m ok with the results.
Conclusion
I still believe in the power of Medium. Even though the results of my case study appear to be lackluster, you have to consider a few things. I basically published and prayed. I tweeted each article once, maybe twice, and did absolutely no more promotion.
If I were to do that on a normal blog, my views would’ve been much lower. I was also able to drive traffic to my website. Even though it was only 27 clicks, that translates to about two subscribers (the website is converting at 10% or so).
That’s two subscribers we didn’t have before so it’s a win.
If you’re going to throw your weight behind Medium, make sure you promote your articles and get accepted to publications. You can get much better results than me.
Hi @dndukwu, thank you for that great article!
You mention Medium publications. From my understanding, it's something like Hackernoon correct? If so, do you have a list of Medium accounts where one can submit their writings? Or maybe a directory of these, splited by category?
This would be awesome (and sooo helpful)!
Thanks
You’re welcome!
There’s actually a website dedicated to helping writers connect with Medium publications.
https://www.smedian.com/pubs
Hope it helps.
Awesome! Thanks!
If you can, I would recommend trying to write Members-only articles and making sure they're really really high quality. This is totally anecdotal, but I published one Members-only article earlier this month. I'm posting the link so that you can see the level of effort/quality that went into this one post while comparing it to Medium stats I'm posting below it:
https://medium.com/@anant90/a-deep-dive-into-the-2018-internet-trends-report-17ae06ebf8a8
Over the past 14 days, the article has received 1825 views, with the following top 5 referrers:
The #2 referrer is the Technology tab on Medium where the article featured for a few days (and is still there after 2 weeks if you scroll down enough). Medium does give you an extra push if they think your article can drive more memberships, and I recommend giving it a shot too!
Oh nice.
The thing is, I’m not trying to make money from Medium. It’s TOFU for me so gating it behind a paywall would be counterproductive to my goals.
Thanks for writing this up!
I'm actually surprised that you got so few views to be perfectly honest. I'm currently a little disappointed with my own Medium stats, so your post gives me a bit of perspective.
I actually started with writing on Medium (https://medium.com/@emilbruckner) with a similar project. Publishing one post every day for 30 days in a row. I published every article in a publication and received a total of about 25.000 views in 30 days. I was extremely happy with that. I also built a following of around 400 people. That's why I'm surprised that you received relatively few views with 700+ followers.
In the last couple of months I also only got an average of ~200 views per article (without publishing daily). I still don't know why my 30 days went so well.
Mmm, nice job!
I didn’t get all my articles in publications and I placed a lot of constraints on how I was promoting.
That could’ve been a contributing factor. Who knows.
I plan on trying again in a bit to see if I can do a lot better.
Damn, that sounds pretty good :)
What if you niche down more?
Instead of being general, going all in on one particular topic.
Definitely worth looking into. I’ll think up a few unique angles.
It`s so interesting situation. I think that Medium really good platform to read news and find some interesting stories and so on.
It is, once you understand it I heard you can drive massive results.
Appreciate the details - these are great benchmarks for us "regular" people on Medium.
You’re welcome Matt, I enjoyed the entire process.
I think I’ll do it again but remove some of my artificial constraints I placed (like how I could promote it).
This was a great read, Daniel. What a wonderful experiment!
Two questions:
How much did you write before this 30 day challenge? (ie. everyday, at least once a week, at least once a month, etc)
Can share any insights if / how your writing (as a skill) improved in that time?
Cheers!
Jonathan
Thanks Jonathan,
I write quite a lot actually. On a slow day, I get about 1500 words knocked out. Right now, I'm doing much more than that because I'm writing a book/guide and I want to get the first draft knocked out as soon as possible.
Something I found surprising was that I didn't have enough topics to write about. The things I wanted to cover were too in depth to get done in a single day (at least for me to do them the justice they deserved). Looking back, I should have planned myself much better.
There were times when It was 10:45 PM and I'd be opening up Microsoft word to get to work on the day's article.
Another thing people appreciate - at least on Medium - is the short honest post. We're all humans and in the startup world everyone is crushing it. It's like a breath of fresh air when someone admits they're a little confused and that's OK.
I'll revisit Medium and remove some of the artificial constraints I placed on myself and see how it goes.
Nice work Daniel! Keep in mind that every single thing you wrote may drive traffic to you in perpetuity :)
Thanks Davis, that's the goal, right? Instead of doing it for the spike in traffic, we're in it for the long haul.