How NOT To Grow On Medium (You Might Be Making These 3 Mistakes)

If you want to grow on Medium, read this!

Har Narayan
4 min readOct 13, 2023
Freepik

Enough stories about “Growing on Medium.”

Let’s talk about how “Not to grow on Medium.” I mean, of course, you want to grow on Medium but there are also some “Cheap” ways that so many people use to grow their followers and get engagement on their stories.

So in this post, I’m going to address what those cheap ways are.

To be clear: I’m not disrespecting anyone who does those things, but it’s just my point of view.

There are better ways to grow on Medium that you should learn and work on instead of wasting your time on these “Cheap” ways.

Also, if this story pisses you off — see you in the next story!

Here are those cheap ways that you should avoid doing and if you’re already doing them you should not do them.

1. Following A Bunch Of People

If you don’t know what to do to grow on Medium, follow a bunch of people.

You do it hoping that you’ll get at least 50% follow back. So if you follow 100 people you expect to get follow back from 50 people, which is a lot by the way. So often it doesn’t happen. However, it does help you grow.

The best way to identify these types of people is to go to the profile, check how many followers they have, and check how many people they’re following. If the following number is way bigger than followers — assume that they're using this method.

I don’t wanna put anyone's name here, but I see these types of accounts at least 10 to 20 times a week.

Well, good for them!

Now here is why I think this is the wrong approach to grow on Medium.

It’s more of a psychological perspective for me. So if I come across your profile and see that you have 200 followers but you follow 1200 people, I would think that you have zero value to provide.

Because you’re putting all your energy into following a bunch of people 5 hours a day, and instead you should be putting your energy into creating top-notch content that attracts true fans.

What’s more, if you’re building your audience the right way you wouldn’t be doing this in the first place.

You follow a bunch of people because you expect to get a follow back from them.

I don’t like it.

2. Commenting 100 Times A Day

Now this might be controversial for so many people.

So many writers who’ve joined the Medium Partner Program try to earn at least for “Grocery” expenses.

Meaning they have to make it. And the best way to do this is to comment a lot (that’s what they think baby). It’s the same concept as “Following a bunch of people” but instead of following you “Mass Comment.”

You comment a lot expecting you’ll get followers and comments back from your fellow or new creators.

Now there are different ways to comment. (we’re not going into that)

But this is the simple analogy.

Somewhere I read…

A lady was arguing with Tony Stubblebine (Medium’s CEO) about how her earnings have been affected by not commenting enough. She goes…

“If I don’t comment on other people's stories, why would they on mine? I have to comment a lot because my earning depends on it”

And when I read the comment, literally land slid beneath my legs. Because I found it extremely ridiculous.

Now here is why I think it’s the wrong way to build an audience.

If you’re a writer, how the hell you can think that way?

True fans don’t build that way. The people who really think you create quality and informational content will read your work regardless of how many comments you drop on other people's stories.

And if you talk about fellow creators, you should not make more than 20 fellow creators. That’s far enough.

You can engage with them once a day or a week. And you also should not do this forcefully. So only become fellow creators with someone whom you really enjoy reading stories of.

3. Creating Crappy Medium Stories

This is a broad conversation.

Most people who follow and comment a lot — really take any time to create valuable content. Because all their time goes for following and commenting.

And they write short stories that barely teach you anything new or change something in you. So what’s the point?

Some writer also use AI tools like ChatGPT to write the whole content and never write it on their own.

The other I found a story, the headline intrigued me so I clicked and what I saw was the guy literally copied one of my stories that I had written and pasted it on ChaGPT, made some changes, and published it again.

I knew that ChatGPT could do it.

But I didn’t do anything with the guy, I just dropped a comment in a sarcastic way in his story.

Because I believe if someone is copying your work this means you’re doing something great that other people aren’t.

So proud of yourself.

If you want to grow your Medium followers, check out his story:

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