After a Year of Writing for Medium
And almost 450 Stories
I read it before.
I guess I just didn’t internalize it as I should have.
But the real lesson I should have learned here won’t take much ink or many electrons.
As you write for Medium, there will be times you get impatient. There will be times you pout and quit Medium. You will try changing your story lengths. You will try to vary your topics. You will look for side gigs. You will experiment with publications.
Forest and the trees here.
The real lesson I finally learned is that, yes, all those things are important to master and do well, but the most important thing is that the strength is in the numbers.
The number of stories in your inventory and the number of people who are looking at your stories.
The higher your inventory and the higher your number of followers, the more eyes will fall on your stuff even if the readers are not subscribed or even searching for it.
Numbers. That’s it.
The more followers you have and the more articles you have written, the more reads you will get. And it is not linear for some reason. Twice as many of one or the other or both seem to give more than twice the reads.
Blame it on some algorithm.
Blame it on the FM principle.
But I am seeing a compounding of results for the amount of energy spent. It seems to work that way. I’m just starting to see it.
I wish I had realized that earlier.
I may keep messing with the minor details, but they are minutia compared to portfolio numbers and the number of followers. I guess I’m just the last person to understand that. In the future, I will realize the highest and best use of my time is in those two directions.
Period.
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