How to gain 25 followers a year on Medium

For all of you seeking fame and fortune on the Medium platform, this article is for you. Follow these 5 simple steps and you are sure amass a follower count that could fill a small to medium sized conference room.

Step 1: Educate yourself on what makes a successful article because good articles equal more followers

After creating your Medium account, spend 6 to 12 months reading the most viral articles. Curate your list of favorite writers and follow them and read voraciously. Get a sense of how often they publish, analyze the article titles, the headlines, their structure, and the images they choose. Find patterns and learn that (1) including a number in your title will lead to clicks and (2) publishing are a regular cadence and consistency will drive engagement. So if you want 25 followers like me ignore #1 and #2.

Step 2: Set unrealistic expectations that make you feel like a failure before you start

Spend days and nights filling your mind with thoughts of quitting your day job and cashing Medium checks. Start looking at property in warm weather locations. Make sure that the properties you are looking at have a good writing room preferably a sun-drenched corner room where you can compose you next award winning article. Pair that optimism with a solid dose of crippling anxiety about what topics you will write about and genuine fear that no one will ever read them. Become paralyzed with fear that you will not be accepted and don’t write an article for another 6 months.

Step 3: Select a topic and completely over analyze it

After selecting the topic you are going to write about, spend hours (hours that you don’t have) doing research. I mean seriously, deep research. Read industry reports, scholarly articles, gather data. Spend time in spreadsheets building statistical models, create and analyze charts trying to find the narrative behind the numbers. When the narrative finally reveals its self, spend an inordinate amount of time building data visualizations that will be most impactful to your story and begin to establish your visual tone of voice. In fact, spend so much time on this part that people know longer care about the topic you chose to write about. When the article is ready to publish, save the draft and keep it there for eternity. Let the fear of your article not being read overcome you and let the article collect digital dust. This will ensure that you gain exactly 0 new followers.

Step 4: If you do publish, constantly refresh your stats page and get sad when it doesn’t change

Right before you publish your article, be sure to bookmark your Medium Stats page to your mobile browser. This way you can refresh and see just how few people enjoying the fruits of your labor. This will allow you to track your follower growth in real time. The amazing thing about this is that when you get a single new follower, the line appears to rise exponentially. This is the reassurance you need to continue on your journey to 25 followers.

Step 5: Get cynical and give up on your hopes of a second career as a thought leader

After stressing over why your articles aren’t appearing on the front page of Medium, set your sights on the Medium algorithm. Recognize that the game is rigged to suppress your brilliance for fear that you might become a bigger star than the website itself. Sure, you didn’t follow a single rule you established about writing regularly or consistently. You didn’t reach out to your 10 followers, nor did you follow them back. None of this matters. It is the algorithms fault. It is always the algorithms fault.

Conclusion

If you follow these five steps, you will find your 25 followers in no time at all. Think about it, in just 12 months you could increase your follower count by 2400% like me from one to 25!

Lastly, take some time to write an article requiring zero research, do not spell chjeck it. Do not think more than two minutes about what you are going to write and mash that publish button.