So I was recently notified of this honor:
To be honest, I wasn’t even aware that there was a “Top Writer” status given on Medium. After clicking on the “Learn more” link in the email, I learned that the “Top Writer” program was started in January, 2017, “to spotlight the most popular voices on any topic — top writers in tags.” The learn more page further states that if you want to increase your chances of getting featured as a top writer that you should write with “Quality” and “Frequency”, and you should build a “Loyal Audience”.
So here are my six best guesses on what I did to get acknowledged as a top writer. The first four have to deal with building a Loyal Audience:
- Build an email distribution list — I started my Mailchimp list in 2013 with 2,200 people on it from my days as an equity analyst on Wall Street. My distribution list is now 7,500. Here are some stats I keep to track my progress. Over the last 4 years, I’ve added 4.8 new people a day on avg to my list. In addition to adding people I meet in person or via email, I also add relevant LinkedIn connections (you can get emails of LinkedIn connections by clicking on the “Show More” tab on the right side on profile pages). People can also subscribe to my list via a link on my emails (my avg email that gets opened, is shared with 1.4 other people). My emails avg. a 30.3% open rate, and an 8.7% click thru rate on opens. Sadly, 1,570 people have unsubscribed from my list. In fact the first response you get from a mass mailing, is people unsubscribing.
- Syndicate Your Medium Posts — there are numerous companies that aggregate (Medium) writers around topics of interest and then syndicate that content to readers via websites and emails. I’m syndicated by AMI in their Hackernoon tech publication. AMI has over 13,000 contributing writers. The three Bitcoin stories Medium referenced in the email above were viewed by 5,100 people, 28% of which came from Hackernoon (thx AMI!). Here’s a list of the top publishers on Medium, which include many syndicators (StartupGrind, The Mission, Free Code Camp …).
- Leverage Your Social Media Reach —19.8% of the viewers to the three Bitcoin posts referenced above came from social media sites, including LinkedIn (7.9%), Facebook (6.3%) and Twitter (5.6%). Most were in response to my posts on the sites, and people who shared my posts.
- Ask Others With Large Social Media Audiences To Share—While this is the cheesiest of my tips, it works, but you can only use this sparingly. If you publish something you think is really good, why not ask people you know to share it. This post I wrote on FAMGA (you’ll have to click the link to learn what FAMGA is) in April, has been viewed more than 12,500 times. Over one-third of those views were generated via a tweet by Downtown Josh Brown. I emailed Josh three days after I published the piece and was unhappy with the traction the piece was getting. As the graph below illustrates, Josh had quite a positive impact on views:
5. Write “Quality” pieces — Duh! But what is quality? There are two pieces of data that Medium provides to writers to help us assess “quality”. One piece of data is “Read Ratio”, which is the % of “Viewers” that finish the story. For my last ten posts, my Read Ratio is 51%. I think the read ratio is more a function of the length then the quality. On Medium “length” is measured by how many minutes it takes to read. My last 10 pieces averaged 4.6 minutes in length. My highest read ratio was 77%, for a satiric 2 minute piece predicting the date that Apple would reach $1 trillion in market cap. I hit a low read ratio of 34% for a 7 minute piece. The other data Medium gives is “Recommends”, which are akin to Facebook “Likes”. The piece I wrote on FAMGA got 155 Recommends. But it was viewed the most. I have my own stat I track, the “Recommend Ratio”, which is the # of Recommends/Views. My FAMGA piece with 155 Recommends had a 1.2% Recommend Ratio. My last 10 pieces have averaged 1.9% recommends per view. My highest Recommend Ratio was 4.4%, for the most personal of my last 10 pieces, about my 8th trip to Israel in two years. I also assume my Recommend Ratio is helped, at the margin, by the begging I do at the bottom of all my posts:
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It’s important to note that, like “Likes” on Facebook, “Recommends” drive virality on Medium. Hence, why I beg for Recommends.
6. Write With Frequency —The more you write, the likelier Medium’s algorithm is to declare you a “Top Writer”. I write when I feel like writing, when I have something to say. I don’t have a schedule. While I greatly benefit from the branding/PR that writing engenders, I really write for myself. I write because the deepest thinking I do is when I’m writing. Forcing myself to research a topic. A last note on Frequency, the more often you write on Medium, the more Medium followers you get. This is the 47th piece I’ve written I started writing on Medium 27 months ago. I now have 2k followers, that I assume, Medium counts as part of my “Loyal Audience”.
I became a “Top Writer” after writing 4 Bitcoin articles in the past month. This will be my 5th Bitcoin tagged article, and it’s not really about Bitcoin, But it will, hopefully, help me to keep my “Top Writer” status a little longer.
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