I’m Stuck Writing on Medium. Any Advice?
It’s been a year since I joined Medium’s Partner Program, and I’m getting frustrated about how it’s going.
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Although I didn’t set any goals at first when starting to write on Medium, once it got up to speed I expected to slowly grow my follower, reads, and fan counts.
Getting started
In the first months, it was great. A couple of stories went viral and I had lots of visualizations and feedback from readers. I even got a story “featured” by Medium and the view count was around 15,000 per month. I was quite impressed by how people were attracted to my content.
Then summer came and I took a break from publishing. I reduced my story count to just 12 articles for the months from July to November and, as expected, visits to them also decreased.
As I wasn’t happy with how it was going, and I enjoy writing, I started regularly publishing again in December and uploaded 16 stories in two and a half months or around one every four to five days. However, it doesn’t seem to be enough, as I can’t manage to gather attention from readers.
Distribution
Another thing that has changed is that I used to get every story distributed by Medium staff in the past, and since this new phase, none of them have been set for further distribution, not even one.
I don’t have the feeling that my writing is worse and I stick to the niche I’ve been successful with in the past. I write about electric vehicles, energy storage, and Tesla, which is where I usually had a fair amount of views. When I tried other fields such as personal finance or artificial intelligence, the stories were not successful.
On the other side, my follower count is still increasing day by day, but I’m not sure if this is primed by Medium since I have stories with just a few reads and no interactions at all.
In my opinion, the penalty from the algorithm for my five months of slower publishing rate is too high, and I’m not sure how I can move forward from here.
Publications
Another thing I haven’t tried enough is uploading my stories to publications. I’ve just done it a couple of times and the results were neither better nor worse. The truth is, it wasn’t through specialized publications, as I’m not sure there are any in my field.
I see other fellow writers who publish everything through publications, but I’m not sure how to get into one and if it would be better to reach more people or not.
I would really appreciate feedback from other writers if they have experienced this situation and how they overcame it.
I’m not going to give up writing, but it doesn’t make much sense when hardly anyone is reading you.
What are your thoughts? Let me know.
