The Busy Medium Bee

Buzzing around and making honey.

I love honey. My teeth can’t handle sugar anymore, so honey is my sweet treat, mostly with a peanut butter sandwich.

The analogy of the bee buzzing around, working hard to make honey and the Medium writer staying active on the site to produce views and money is appropriate I think. Bees take time off in the winter in cold locations though.

Unless a person has a massive audience somewhere else they can successfully transfer over to Medium, building a regular audience on the site takes time and a consistent effort.

What I’ve noticed since writing on Medium regularly for the last three months is the time spent reading and interacting with other writers’ work directly correlates with how many views and money you make.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been posting as much as ever, yet have decreased my interaction by about 70%. I’ve noticed my views and interactions have decreased by about the same.

On the one hand, this can be discouraging because we may feel under the whip of having to interact to gain any traction; on the other hand, it gives us something we can do to help our chances of gaining traction.

The good part is reading and interacting on the site helps us learn, gain insights, and feel more connected with other fellow writers. This is good considering how lonely writers can get when focusing on their craft and building their online presence.

There really is no substitute for purposeful interaction to help build a sincere audience of readers. This is true at WordPress, Medium, and other similar sites.

All of the shortcuts we see people do at Medium aren’t going to really help speed up the process.

The only way to stay consistent at Medium and WordPress is to genuinely like the communities and want to interact with them.

I imagine someone who can read and clap on 50 articles a day, leave 25 comments, and follow dozens of people they like would find they are stirring up a buzz around the place. If they could sustain this for a year they would likely have great success here along with posting quality articles.

Most of us can’t sustain this type of interaction, yet it is interesting to consider.

At NewsBreak I make much more now than I do at Medium and I don’t have to interact at all. I already have over 500 followers even though only have half as many articles and hardly any interaction.

I think most writers find Medium requires too much energy for what they are getting in return. That’s why we see so many ghosted profiles.

Maybe the best strategy is to schedule a certain amount of time you can spare for reading and interacting. Maybe a certain amount of articles you will read on Medium and WordPress. Staying consistent with the effort would bring the best results.

Watching the views go down and the followers diminish is discouraging, so instead of letting the downward trend gain steam, get busy and make some honey. That’s my advice.

Happy writing.

Comments

Opinion: Most communities in Oregon and the US are Republican, yet Democrats are in charge

2022 Oregon Governor Election Photo Assuming election results are valid in Oregon, which does take a lot of faith these days after the questions about the 2020 US Presidential election arose, Democrat Tina Kotek won the Governor’s race in 2022 by a slim margin over Republican Christine Drazan. The interesting aspect of this win is how many of Oregon’s 36 counties voted Republican vs. Democrat. Looking at the political map, almost the entire state is red with only a few small counties in the northwest having the blue color. Specifically, there were 7 counties that voted Democrat and 29 that voted Republican. The difference is the 7 counties voting blue are the most populous counties, also the counties with the most residents coming from other states – much like Tina Kotek herself, a transplant from Pennsylvania . Tina only won the campaign to be Oregon’s 39th Governor by 66,727 votes over Christine Drazan. Said in another way, the Democrats pulled off another close election with m...

What Happens to the Writer's Brain

Too many ideas and voices. It’s been around 40 days since I published an article, and I wanted to explain what happens in the writer’s brain. Essentially, I have too many ideas for articles to write and this causes my brain to meltdown and write nothing. While these ideas are flowing through the brain, life is happening; appliances need replacing, cars need repair, family trips, people passing away, bills getting lost in the mail, and other life happenings like work and chores. In between all of this, these ideas sometimes don’t find place to be expressed in the short time frame I have to share them. The exercise becomes too difficult, the writing takes a back seat to just relaxing and doing productive things around the homestead. Still, the writing brain is getting backed up with all of these ideas, and it begins to distrust they will ever see the light of day by being expressed and published. The hope of finding a fluid streamlined workflow for these ideas to be published diminishes ...

Attention Seeking in the Hive Mind Collective

Losing and finding motivation in a fake online world. The perception of reality is what rules the online world, yet reality is what we have to face in our flesh and bone lives. How does the perception change the reality of our lives? The spinning stimulus the online world creates in our minds, balloons the creative ideas and then sends them shooting out the sides of the tornado. Catching these fleeting ideas and taking the time to express them becomes too arduous in a world of changing themes in the translucent hive mind concept. Before the methodical writer chews on the idea and takes the time to process them into a clarifying expression, the winds of change blow in thousands more that distract and override the initial project. The bots and human hackers, plying for greatness and attention, clamoring for a slice of the fake bot pie, have already exhausted every avenue of thought the masses are cornered into considering from social engineering tactics. Attention is scarce, and more so ...

Rocky (1976) Movie Review

Duncan Chen/ Flickr One of the best movies of all time. The Genuine Approach It’s hard to believe this iconic American movie was created 50 years ago in 1976, three years before I was even born. It is also hard to believe how well the movie has stood the test of time as one of the best American movies ever made. The entire Rocky series of movies, including 6 movies directly about Rocky Balboa (not counting the two Creed movies which have him as a secondary character), are amazing movies that inspire the viewer and represent the American dream of working our way up from the bottom to become a success. Although the subsequent Rocky movies are great in their own right, none of them compare to the original Rocky movie. What makes the original Rocky movie one of the best of all time isn’t one thing, rather it is a culmination of a myriad of factors that combined at the right time to give us a genuine, humble, and ever-relatable stor...

Business and Society Articles

Search This Blog