You are so ecstatic when that follower number hit 100, 400, 800, here we go — 1000 followers , all in a span of 3 months! Surely you won’t ever face a slow growth on Medium, right?
Not only that, the views on your articles are also steadily increassing. Nice!
Congratulation. You just experienced, what I call a parabolic run.
“my kind suggestion:
Enjoy this my friend — you deserve it!”
Now, after the parabolic run, moving from 0 to 100 so fast, there would be a time when your growth slow, let’s call it a “plateau state”
The Slow Growth on Medium
Where you are not sprinting anymore, but, say, jogging or warming up on the bleacher (not bad).
Now, at some points on my Medium journey, I had experienced a parabolic run, and now probably hitting a plateau state, where the follower, views, and claps are not coming like crazy anymore.
Regardless wherever you are in your Medium journey, it’s important to prepare yourself for the plateau state, A.K.A the slow Medium Growth phase period, where the reads, views, and claps are as consistent as the TikTok girls/boys you’re trying to flirt ( I know right).
Having been here for almost a year now, I’ve learned some lessons on being patient, and dealing with the slow medium growth — let’s dive in:
are you here for the long run or short one
In the beginning of your Medium journey you need to decide whether this is the game you would play forever, or just temporary.
Are you a tourist? Or are you a local?
If you are here just for the short term, writing because you are bored, got nothing else to do, it’s easy to think you would easily give up when the rewards are not there anymore (i.e the slow month).
But if you want to play a long game, just realized that things will go up and down very frequently. Sometimes you would easily (with no sweat) get your story viral and gaining huge traction instantly, but on another day, you would barely get more than double digits views.
It is only natural
My suggestion is just to play a long game, and keep putting all the reps until it builds your kingdom of story that you are proud of.
Trust me, all your hard work will be paid off eventually. Just play a long game.
“sometimes, it only takes one story to break the damn”
During this slow growth process, do ask yourself: What can I do right now to learn faster and better.
Maybe we might have simply missed out a few marketing stratgy, or missed out a few messages from our followers. Anyway, take action!
There’s always more to learn and we can always find ways to improve our content strategy.
When I first started out Medium, I followed Sinem Günel; a Medium writer with over 72,000 followers. Her content strategy is unique and I highly suggest you to watch the videos.
Burned out? Zoom Out!
In the last few months of my writing journey on Medium, I was actually coming to almost “burned out” stage of writing.
With no possible future of joining the Medium Partner Program, plus tons of external work that kept me from writing more on this platform, I was almost done (completely) from churning out story in a regular basis.
But once I had that thought, I quicklly snapped back out of it, and turned my perspective outward.
-what was my initial goal of writing?
-what motivate me to write without even getting paid?
-What actually my writing plan long term?
The reason I was frustrated of writing solely lied in the fact I was lost with my initial vision.
The one core motivation why I did what I did. Why I posted my first story a year ago. Why it liberated me so much that I promised myself to do this long term.
I did a lot of zooming in, getting work up by small details, like not being able to get paid with MPP, small views, and other nonsense stupid stuff that kept me from seeing the bigger picture.
What I needed to do was to zoom out. Rekindle the core mission. Recalibrate myself to the bigger prize. Focusing on building a community of like-minded individuals, and grow together long term — that’s what I needed to do!
When you zoom out, all the small details that bug you become so irrelevant.
- Why you want to write in the first place?
- What is your long term vision of writing?
- Where do you see your writing empire in the next 5 years, or 10 years?
- How much you feel satisfied when you see people appreciating your story? The impact of those stories?
Try asking these question to yourself,and zoom out every once in a while to get out from all the small, irrelevant, and nitty-gritty details of growing in this platform.
Trust me, you would thank yourself later.
Hit Stability, rather than Crazy Growth
It’s indeed fun to gain 4 figures or 5 figures views for a single story on Medium.
But the truth is: It won’t happen every time (at least to most writers)
Sometimes you hit the strike when you throw the ball, sometimes you only hit one or two pieces — that’s okay my friends! I suck at bowling too (FYI).
All you need to do is to achieve stability when it comes to writing.
Try to be more consistent with posting, engaging, and creating contents overall.
Focus instead on the output based process, rather than outcome-based process.
- focus on creating and posting the contents, rather than the outcome you hope to achieve by those contents
- fill up your brain with knowledge, learning new things when you are not in the mood of writing
- go out and experience life, doing cool activities, meet new people, so you have more materials to write
- The more you throw the ball, the higher chance that you would hit a strike next time.
But you still need to throw the ball. Take chances.
So throw the ball, keep on writing, like what the modern guru Alex Hormozi says:
“nothing happen,
And everything happen!”
Hang in there my friends!
