Member-only story
Three Lessons Learned From My Articles with Over 900 Fans
Reflections to improve your readership
As of now, early 2020, I’ve been writing on Medium for about one year. In that period I’ve published over 120 stories, built a following of over 3,300 people, and written multiple articles that have received claps from over 900 readers.
I previously wrote about my five-month (and ongoing) analysis that indicates fans are the greatest predictor of earnings despite the Medium algorithm counting member reading time.
Since fans best correlate with daily earnings, I decided to analyze my five articles that have over 900 fans and share my findings with you.
Opinionated Headlines
I mainly write programming tutorials; what I classify as instructive content. As a result, my headlines take on some flavor of how to, what is, or x ways to. These headlines are concise, clear, and boring. They also alienate an audience who is already familiar with whatever concept my article covers.
Three of my five top performing articles began with the words “Stop Using”. This headline is bold, drilling beyond the content by making a plea for behavior change. Moreover, the headline piques curiosity regardless of whether you know about the topic or not.
