The Secrets Of My Failure

Hint: Your follower count means nothing

Photo by Peter Secan on Unsplash (For those too young to recognize this car, it’s the Edsel — the biggest failure ever to come out of an American car company.)

Upon first discovering Medium, I dove into the deep end — writing and researching my ass off in some misbegotten attempt at success. Why not? The pandemic was in full effect. What else did I have to do?

I read countless stories about how to succeed here. Be controversial. Bear your soul. Write lists. Format correctly. Proofread your articles. I tried it all and of course, none of it worked. The few stories I had that went viral and earned real money were no better than the stillbirths. By me, there was no secret formula.

But there was one piece of advice I took that at least made sense: Find stories on Medium in your niche — and then follow all the people who clapped for those stories. Medium allows you to do this 150 times a day. If 10% of the people you followed follow you back, you’ll have a lot of fans in short order — promised the advisor who dispensed this piece of wisdom.

For months, I did this on an almost daily basis. The ratio was about as predicted. For every 10 people I followed, 1 followed me back. And now I have over 3000 followers. Here’s the problem:

Just because they followed me back doesn't mean they read my stories. In fact, they don’t read my stories. It’s all smoke and mirrors — and not really worth the effort…