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The Erroneous Race to a 100 Followers
Fellow Medium writers, please consider that simply posting a link and saying, “follow me, and I’ll follow you” is not going to achieve your maximum potential as a writer.
For starters, if we each have 100 feeds on our Medium pages, we won’t have the bandwidth or time budgets to keep up. Is your hope that you’re going to stick out from the crowd once you get to that 100? Well, then you need to think about intriguing headlines, writing about topics that aren’t over-saturated, or writing for an audience you can connect too. You need to be thinking about that before you get to the 100 followers.
More importantly, there’s also the question of whether a content farm will fulfill your goals. A little over a dozen years ago I wanted to break into journalism and write, and it was tempting to think that content farms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_farm) could be the answer. The barrier to getting published outside of a content farm seemed greater but it’s not always the case.
Granted, Medium is better than the content farms of a dozen years ago that I wrote for (Helium, Examiner), BUT you are still earning less than a penny per page view and I hear the number is going down. I’m not suggesting content farms don’t have uses — visibility, the catharsis of putting stuff on paper, experimenting with building a brand and an audience, forming a community of writers with others — but there is more out there that can help get an audience (and perhaps a more loyal audience) and make money through crowd-funding, e-books, or articles for hire.
Some of you might have writing that can already fill a professional niche, if anyone wants I can give them a free consultation as someone who has published in over 3 dozen publications.
More about me: http://www.muckrack.com/orrin-konheim
